COPY INTO: Backslash preceding field separator kills import

[monetdb-team]

Date: 2015-07-21 13:18:18 +0200
From: @hannesmuehleisen
To: SQL devs <>
Version: 11.19.3 (Oct2014)
CC: @njnes, @drstmane

Last updated: 2015-08-28 13:41:49 +0200

Comment 21032

Date: 2015-07-21 13:18:18 +0200
From: @hannesmuehleisen

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/43.0.2357.132 Safari/537.36
Build Identifier:

Backslashes preceding the field separator lead to import failure in COPY INTO.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

start transaction;
create table whatgoodisadatabaseifyoucannotimport(a string, b integer);
copy 1 records into whatgoodisadatabaseifyoucannotimport from stdin using delimiters ' ','\n','';
asdf\ 42

rollback;

Actual Results:

Failed to import table (and that's it)

Expected Results:

Backslash should be read as literal backslash.

Comment 21033

Date: 2015-07-21 13:33:04 +0200
From: @drstmane

Oct2014 was still a bit more elaborate on error messages:

sql>start transaction;
auto commit mode: off
sql>create table whatgoodisadatabaseifyoucannotimport(a string, b integer);
operation successful (0.515ms)
sql>copy 1 records into whatgoodisadatabaseifyoucannotimport from stdin using
more>delimiters ' ','\n','';
more>asdf\ 42
missing separator ' ' line 0 expecting 1 got 0 fields
failed to import table
sql>

These apparently got lost on the default branch before the Jul2015 branch was created ...

Comment 21034

Date: 2015-07-21 13:58:22 +0200
From: @hannesmuehleisen

Same error when using the BEST EFFORT flag.

Comment 21035

Date: 2015-07-21 17:19:54 +0200
From: MonetDB Mercurial Repository <>

Changeset 5923731a420d made by Hannes Muehleisen hannes@cwi.nl in the MonetDB repo, refers to this bug.

For complete details, see http//devmonetdborg/hg/MonetDB?cmd=changeset;node=5923731a420d

Changeset description:

Test for Bug #3775

Comment 21036

Date: 2015-07-22 09:07:22 +0200
From: @njnes

in copy into the '' is treated as escape symbol. Looking into the missing error.

Comment 21039

Date: 2015-07-22 10:20:38 +0200
From: MonetDB Mercurial Repository <>

Changeset b26c48634f0d made by Niels Nes niels@cwi.nl in the MonetDB repo, refers to this bug.

For complete details, see http//devmonetdborg/hg/MonetDB?cmd=changeset;node=b26c48634f0d

Changeset description:

added tests for bugs 3775 and 3773

Comment 21188

Date: 2015-08-28 13:41:49 +0200
From: @sjoerdmullender

Jul2015 has been released.