Is it possible to turn off quote processing in the Postgres COPY command with CSV format?

Question

I have CSV files, tab-separated, fields not wrapped in quotes, where field data can contain characters like single quotes, double quotes, pipes and backslashes.

Sample data can look like this:

1       2       "ba$aR\eR\       18 

I want to import this data into Postgres using the COPY statement.

When I try to import this using

COPY <tablename> FROM  <filename> NULL AS ''; 

I get an error psql:-:1: ERROR: missing data for column because Postgres is treating the backslash + tab as an "escaped tab" instead of a backslash followed by the field separator.

So I switched to using the "CSV format" of the COPY operator, like so:

COPY <tablename> FROM <filename> WITH CSV DELIMITER E'\t' NULL AS ''; 

Now there's a new error psql:-:1: ERROR: value too long for type character varying(254)

Apparently because it's interpreting the double-quote at the start of field 3 as the field wrapping character.

How can I specify that my data is NOT quoted at all?

Answer 1

Workaround (thanks to this comment!)

COPY <tablename> FROM <filename> WITH CSV DELIMITER E'\t' QUOTE E'\b' NULL AS ''; 

So basically specifying a quote character that should never be in the text, but that's pretty ugly.

I'd much prefer it if there was in fact a way to turn off quote processing altogether.