Postgres 9.3 end-of-copy marker corrupt - Any way to change this setting?

Question

I am trying to stream data through an AWK program to a Postgres COPY command. This works great usually. However, in my data recently I have been getting long text stings containing '\.' values.

Postgres Documentation mentions this combination of characters represents the end-of-data marker, http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/sql-copy.html, and I am getting the associated errors when trying to insert with COPY.

My question is, is there a way to turn this off? Perhaps change the end-of-data marker to a different combination of characters? Or do I have to alter/remove these strings before trying to insert using the COPY command?

Answer 1

You can try to filter your data through sed 's:\\:\\\\:g' - this would change every \ in your data to \\, which is a correct escape sequence for single backslash in copy data.

But I think not only backslash would be problematic. Also newlines should be encoded by \n, carriage returns as \r and tabs as \t (tab is a default field delimiter in copy).