PG COPY error: invalid input syntax for integer

Question

Running COPY results in ERROR: invalid input syntax for integer: \"\" error message for me. What am I missing?

My /tmp/people.cs

Answer 1

this ought to work without you modifying the source csv file:

alter table people alter column age type text;
copy people from '/tmp/people.csv' with csv;

Answer 2

I got this error when loading '|' separated CSV file although there were no '"' characters in my input file. It turned out that I forgot to specify FORMAT:

COPY ... FROM ... WITH (FORMAT CSV, DELIMITER '|').

Answer 3

CREATE TABLE people (
  first_name varchar(20),
  age        integer,
  last_name  varchar(20)
);

"first_name","age","last_name" Ivan,23,Poupkine Eugene,,Pirogov

copy people from 'file.csv' with (delimiter ';', null '');

select * from people;

Just in first column.....

Answer 4

I think it's better to change your csv file like:

"age","first_name","last_name"
23,Ivan,Poupkine
,Eugene,Pirogov

It's also possible to define your table like

CREATE TABLE people (
  age        varchar(20),
  first_name varchar(20),
  last_name  varchar(20)
);

and after copy, you can convert empty strings:

select nullif(age, '')::int as age, first_name, last_name
from people

Answer 5

I had this same error on a postgres .sql file with a COPY statement, but my file was tab-separated instead of comma-separated and quoted.

My mistake was that I eagerly copy/pasted the file contents from github, but in that process all the tabs were converted to spaces, hence the error. I had to download and save the raw file to get a good copy.

Answer 6

Just came across this while looking for a solution and wanted to add I was able to solve the issue by adding the "null" parameter to the copy_from call:

cur.copy_from(f, tablename, sep=',', null='')