On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Tom Lane<t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Andrew Dunstan <and...@dunslane.net> writes: >> I have received a requirement for the ability to import ragged CSV >> files, i.e. files that contain variable numbers of columns per row. The >> requirement is that extra columns would be ignored and missing columns >> filled with NULL. The client wanting this has wrestled with some >> preprocessors to try to get what they want, but they would feel happier >> with this built in. This isn't the first time I have received this >> request since we implemented CSV import. People have complained on >> numerous occasions about the strictness of the import routines w.r.t. >> the number of columns. > > Hmm. Accepting too few columns and filling with nulls isn't any > different than what INSERT has always done. But ignoring extra columns > seems like a different ballgame. Can you talk your client out of that > one? It just seems like a bad idea.
I agree that ignoring extra columns is a bad idea, but I don't even like the idea of ignoring missing columns. It doesn't seem like a good idea to take a spreadsheet and feed it into COPY without doing any validation anyway, and this is the kind of thing that is trivial to clean up with a thin layer of Perl or your scripting language of choice. ...Robert -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
