ERROR: COPY delimiter must be a single one-byte character

Question

I want to load the data from a flat file with delimiter \"~,~\" into a PostgreSQL table. I have tried it as below but looks like there is a restriction for the delimiter. If

Answer 1

Unfortunatelly there is no way to load flat file with multiple characters delimiter ~,~ in Postgres unless you want to modify source code (and recompile of course) by yourself in some (terrific) way:

/* Only single-byte delimiter strings are supported. */
if (strlen(cstate->delim) != 1)
    ereport(ERROR,
        (errcode(ERRCODE_FEATURE_NOT_SUPPORTED),
    errmsg("COPY delimiter must be a single one-byte character")));

What you want is to preprocess your input file with some external tool, for example sed might to be best companion on GNU/Linux platfom, for example:

sed s/~,~/\\t/g inputFile