Tom Lane wrote: > Andrew Gould <andrewlylegould@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >> To the list: Does pg_dump escape characters that are the same as the >> delimiter? > > Yes. The OP has not actually explained why he needs to pick a > nondefault delimiter, unless maybe it is that he wants to feed the > dump to some program that is too dumb to deal with escaping. > > regards, tom lane > Which makes me wonder, does copy accept UTF-8 input? Is it possibile to use some unicode character which is unlikely to appear in the data set as delimiter? Something like U+FFFC. Here I'm using U+25CF for it's much more likely you can see it (it's a black circle). $ python -c 'print u";".join("ABCD").encode("utf8")' > 1.txt $ cat 1.txt A;B;C;D $ python -c 'print u"\u25cf".join("ABCD").encode("utf8")' > 2.txt $ cat 2.txt A●B●C●D $ psql -c "\d test" Table "public.test" Column | Type | Modifiers --------+------+----------- a | text | b | text | c | text | d | text | $ psql -c "\copy test from '1.txt' delimiter ;" $ psql -c "\copy test from '2.txt' delimiter ●" ERROR: COPY delimiter must be a single character \copy: ERROR: COPY delimiter must be a single character It doesn't seem to work, but I need to stress that I'm using $ psql --version psql (PostgreSQL) 8.2.9 .TM. -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general