psql invalid command \N while restore sql

Question

I\'m trying to restore my dump file, but it caused an error:

psql:psit.sql:27485: invalid command \\N

Is there a solution? I searched, but

Answer 1

In my recent experience, it's possible to get this error when the real problem has nothing to do with escape characters or newlines. In my case, I had created a dump from database A with
pg_dump -a -t table_name > dump.sql
and was trying to restore it to database B with
psql < dump.sql (after updating the proper env vars, of course)
What I finally figured out was that the dump, though it was data-only (the -a option, so that the table structure isn't explicitly part of the dump), was schema-specific. That meant that without manually modifying the dump, I couldn't use a dump generated from schema1.table_name to populate schema2.table_name. Manually modifying the dump was easy, the schema is specified in the first 15 lines or so.

Answer 2

Same thing was happened to me today. I handled issue by dumping with --inserts command.

What I do is:

1) pg_dump with inserts:

pg_dump dbname --username=usernamehere --password --no-owner --no-privileges --data-only --inserts -t 'schema."Table"' > filename.sql

2) psql (restore your dumped file)

psql "dbname=dbnamehere options=--search_path=schemaname" --host hostnamehere --username=usernamehere -f filename.sql >& outputfile.txt

Note-1 ) Make sure that adding outputfile will increase speed of import.

Note-2 ) Do not forget to create table with exact same name and columns before importing with psql.