On October 24, 2007 01:10:59 am Paul Lambert wrote: > > I get around this problem with my data loads by specifying some other > arbitrary character that I know won't appear in the data as the quote > character. > > Eg QUOTE E'\f' will specify form feed as the quote character, ergo any > data with double or single quotes will be loaded with those quote > characters in the string. > > Something similar may help with your case.
This was the solution. I specified a quote character that was not in the data and the data imported perfectly. Without specifying any delimiter postgres defaults to one of the quotes (I forget which). Unfortunately, the data I imported wasn't good. MaxMind, like the Geonames.org derivatives, uses FIPS code for a state identifier in the cities table for all countries EXCEPT USA in which case they use the iso code. Both these data sets mix types within one column and I find that absolutely unacceptable. Back to my original problem, which was trying to COPY in some of the earth-info.nga.mil world city data. This data is tab delimited, no quotes around fields, newline line terminated and UTF-8 encoded. Using a similar COPY statement with the defaults, it fails with this: COPY geo.orig_city FROM '/home/www/geo/DATA/nga.mil/geonames_no_header.txt'; ERROR: literal carriage return found in data HINT: Use "\r" to represent carriage return. CONTEXT: COPY orig_city, line 1071850 And of course, at that line we find a field that has several lines which appear (using cat -A) to be terminated with a new line ($). I originally deleted this line but there are others like it. And the file is 2 Gigs in size so it isn't acceptable to comb through it. I believe this is a new problem because I have a vintage file dated early 2007 that didn't have this problem. Does anyone know how to solve this COPY issue? ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq