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Message-ID: <4A5F9023.2030200@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:40:03 -0500
From: Chris Spotts <rfusca@gmail.com>
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To: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
CC: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>,
	Itagaki Takahiro <itagaki.takahiro@oss.ntt.co.jp>,
	Jaime Casanova <jcasanov@systemguards.com.ec>,
	pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: COPY WITH CSV FORCE QUOTE *
References: <3073cc9b0907132239j420dfdc7na4b362458a2495e4@mail.gmail.com>
	<20090714152309.944E.52131E4D@oss.ntt.co.jp>
	<20090714162110.9457.52131E4D@oss.ntt.co.jp>
	<4A5CB2E6.8040502@dunslane.net> <4A5F797F.4040508@agliodbs.com>
	<4A5F7EE2.5000704@dunslane.net> <4A5F89E2.50507@agliodbs.com>
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Josh Berkus wrote:
> Andrew,
>
>> AFAICT on a brief look at the patch, it doesn't affect the quoting of
>> nulls on export, it just allows * as an alias for all columns for FORCE
>> QUOTE (as well as FORCE NOT NULL). But FORCE QUOTE has never forced
>> quoting of null values, only non-null values. We have never quoted null
>> values, and I'm fairly resistant to any suggestion that we should.
>
> See?  That's what happens when I can't build the docs.  ;-)  (and 
> there's no previous discussion of the feature).
>
>>
>> As for importing data from programs that produce all values in quotes
>> including null/missing values (your pro case above), arguably what we
>> need is another flag that would turn an empty string into a null.
>
> ooooh, TODO, please?  There's a lot of this out there, and I've had to 
> build sed into a lot of import routines.
>
+1 For that on the TODO, happens all the time...