This is going to be a short article which will illustrate importing and exporting a table from or to a csv file using PostgreSQL COPY command.

Importing a table from CSV

Assuming you already have a table in place with the right columns, the command is as follows

COPY FROM ‘/path/to/csv/SourceCSVFile.csv’ DELIMITERS ‘,’ CSV;

Exporting a CSV from a table.

COPY TO ‘/path/to/csv/TargetCSVFile’ DELIMITERS ‘,’ CSV;

Its important to mention here that generally if your data is in unicode or need strict Encoding, then Always set client_encoding before running any of the above mentioned commands.

To set CLIENT_ENCODING parameter in PostgreSQL

set client_encoding to ‘UTF8’

or set client_encoding to ’latin1’

Another thing to guard against is nulls, while exporting , if some fields are null then PostgreSQL will add ’/N’ to represent a null field, this is fine but may cause issues if you are trying to import that data in say SQL server.

A quick fix is modify the export command by specifying what would you prefer as a null placeholder in exported CSV

COPY TO ‘/path/to/csv/TargetCSVFile’ DELIMITERS ‘,’ NULL as E’’;

Another common requirement is import or export with the header.

Import CSV to table with Header for columns present in first row of csv file.

COPY FROM ‘/path/to/csv/SourceCSVFile.csv’ DELIMITERS ‘,’ CSV HEADER

Export a table to CSV with Headers present in the first row.

COPY TO ‘/path/to/csv/TargetCSVFile’ DELIMITERS ‘,’ CSV HEADER;

A complete list of all supported settings can be found here

   FROM { 'filename' | STDIN }
   [ [ WITH ] ( option [, ...] ) ]

COPY { table\_name [ ( column [, ...] ) ] | ( query ) }
   TO { 'filename' | STDOUT }
   [ [ WITH ] ( option [, ...] ) ]

where option can be one of:

   FORMAT format\_name
   OIDS [ boolean ]
   DELIMITER 'delimiter\_character'
   NULL 'null\_string'
   HEADER [ boolean ]
   QUOTE 'quote\_character'
   ESCAPE 'escape\_character'
   FORCE\_QUOTE { ( column [, ...] ) | * }
   FORCE\_NOT\_NULL ( column [, ...] ) |
   ENCODING 'encoding\_name'
Copy