"COPY .. INTO ..." - escape of string quotes

[monetdb-team]

Date: 2013-11-04 15:20:21 +0100
From: Pete Hollobon <>
To: SQL devs <>
Version: 11.15.19 (Feb2013-SP6)
CC: pete

Last updated: 2014-02-20 15:02:39 +0100

Comment 19319

Date: 2013-11-04 15:20:21 +0100
From: Pete Hollobon <>

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/30.0.1599.101 Safari/537.36
Build Identifier:

When using COPY ... INTO ..., using a non-standard string quote, any instances of that quote character in tables are not escaped, but the default string quote (") is escaped.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

create table pete_test.dumptest (a clob, b clob);
insert into pete_test.dumptest values ('one|two', 'three"four');
COPY (SELECT * FROM pete_test.dumptest) INTO STDOUT DELIMITERS ',', '\n', '|';

Actual Results:

&1 0 1 2 1
% pete_test.dumptest, pete_test.dumptest table_name
% a, b name
% clob, clob type
% 7, 10 length
% 0 0, 0 0 typesizes
|one|two|,|three"four|
&2 1 -1

Expected Results:

|one|two|,|three"four|

Comment 19322

Date: 2013-11-05 11:24:10 +0100
From: Pete Hollobon <>

The same issue exists for non-standard record separators - newline is always escaped, the actual record separator used is not.

Comment 19389

Date: 2013-12-03 14:24:45 +0100
From: MonetDB Mercurial Repository <>

Changeset 14d425f1286f made by Sjoerd Mullender sjoerd@acm.org in the MonetDB repo, refers to this bug.

For complete details, see http//devmonetdborg/hg/MonetDB?cmd=changeset;node=14d425f1286f

Changeset description:

Propagate quotes and separators down to "tostr" function.
Added test as well.
This fixes bug #3393.

Comment 19390

Date: 2013-12-03 14:25:19 +0100
From: @sjoerdmullender

Fixed in Jan2014 branch since it involves an ABI change.

Comment 19602

Date: 2014-02-20 15:02:39 +0100
From: @sjoerdmullender

Jan2014 has been released.