Thread: import from tsv

I need to import data from a TSV. Using the import dialog and selecting text as the file format, I can select [tab] from the delimiter drop down. There is a notice that tab is the default, but apparently no way to leave that blank, thus accepting the default. I think that might be significant because this is my error message:

ERROR: COPY delimiter must be a single one-byte character

Above that, where it spells out the actual SQL code that was run, there is:

" ...DELIMITER E'\\t' ..."

So the delimiter PGAdmin4 is choking on is the delimiter it chose to use. All I did was select from a drop down.

Besides, how would I make [tab], '\t', or '\\t' single byte code?

I ran it again as csv instead of text, but still with the tab delimiter, same result.

That gave me an idea to put the result into the SQL Query Tool, take out one \ and see what happens. But now it objects to the / at the start of the command, which I also didn't put in there.

Ok, I took that out.

Now I get a syntax error at 'usr', so maybe it needs that in quotes.

Ok, I did that (single quotes) but I got this ambiguous message back:

ERROR: syntax error at or near "'/usr/lib/postgresql/9.4/bin/psql'" LINE 1: '/usr/lib/postgresql/9.4/bin/psql' --host "localhost" --port... ^ Query returned successfully in 114 msec.

How can it be successful and erroneous at the same time? Best guess, this is not a 'fatal' error. But it is serious enough. Nothing transferred to my table.

I tried again with the path double quoted, and this time I got a plain old error, no success, and no data.

No quotes, single quotes, and double quotes all failed, so I decided to prepend a backslash to the path:

Another syntax error. Just for the hell of it, I ran the prepended backslash with both double and single quotes, none of which worked.

So maybe the '\t' with one backslash will work as a single byte character delimiter, but since I can't get the sql that I got from pgadmin4 to run for me, I won't know.