Thomas, Andrew, Karel, Thomas is correct: many applications which read or make CSVs will accept a newline if it is enclosed in a quote.
> > I *have* seen monstrosities like fields that do not begin with the quote > > character but then break into a quote, e.g.: > > > > 1,2,a,123"abc""def",6,7,8 This I have never seen. It looks like a hackish error to me. What application is it from? Frankly, I would expect any CSV reader to error out on the above, and would be annoyed if it did not. Overall, I assert again that approaching this issue through COPY enhancements is really not the way to go. We should be looking at a client utility, like pg_import and pg_export. The primary purpose of COPY is bulk loads for backup/restore, and I'm against doing a lot of tinkering which might make it less efficient or introduce new issues into what's currently very reliable. -- -Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org