CASSANDRA-21415: Document COPY TO limitation for control characters in text columns#4856
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bschoening
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Jun 1, 2026
| accordance with RFC 4180. Text columns containing control characters | ||
| such as newlines (`\n`), carriage returns (`\r`), null bytes (`\x00`), | ||
| or other non-printable characters will not round-trip cleanly — values | ||
| will be corrupted on re-import via `COPY FROM`. If your data contains |
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suggest: "cannot be reliably exported — values will be corrupted on re-import via COPY FROM"
bschoening
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Jun 1, 2026
| accordance with RFC 4180. Text columns containing control characters | ||
| such as newlines (`\n`), carriage returns (`\r`), null bytes (`\x00`), | ||
| or other non-printable characters will not round-trip cleanly — values | ||
| will be corrupted on re-import via `COPY FROM`. If your data contains |
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There should be some mention of the security risks of binary data. Suggest this after COPY FROM:
Beyond data integrity, non-printable characters in CSV output can pose security risks,
including CSV injection and other forms of malicious data embedding.
arvindKandpal-ksolves
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…n text columns COPY TO does not support control characters in text column values per RFC 4180. This patch documents the limitation in the cqlsh reference, including the security risks and alternative tools for data migration. patch by Arvind Kandpal; reviewed by TBD for CASSANDRA-21415
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Hi @bschoening , updated the title and description for the new jira ticket and also update the suggested changes. |
bschoening
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Jun 2, 2026
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COPY TO does not support control characters (such as newlines, carriage
returns, or null bytes) in text column values. Any text column containing
these characters will be silently corrupted on round-trip — COPY TO
succeeds and COPY FROM succeeds, but the re-imported values differ from
the originals.
This patch documents that limitation clearly in the COPY TO section of
the cqlsh reference, in accordance with RFC 4180 which defines CSV
TEXTDATA as printable characters only. Users with such data are directed
to sstableloader for data migration instead.
patch by Arvind Kandpal; reviewed by for CASSANDRA-21415