Andrew,
> AFAICT on a brief look at the patch, it doesn't affect the quoting of
> nulls on export, it just allows * as an alias for all columns for FORCE
> QUOTE (as well as FORCE NOT NULL). But FORCE QUOTE has never forced
> quoting of null values, only non-null values. We have never quoted null
> values, and I'm fairly resistant to any suggestion that we should.
See? That's what happens when I can't build the docs. ;-) (and
there's no previous discussion of the feature).
>
> As for importing data from programs that produce all values in quotes
> including null/missing values (your pro case above), arguably what we
> need is another flag that would turn an empty string into a null.
ooooh, TODO, please? There's a lot of this out there, and I've had to
build sed into a lot of import routines.
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
www.pgexperts.com