data comes in a string, inserting into postgresql with java, what's most efficient way to break up the data?

Question

I am writing a program in Java that uses the JDBC driver with Postgresql. I am using an API which when called, returns data in a string like so:

id=-870229851 date = finished-20130501  15:13:07-20130502  15:13:07 open=-1.0 high=-1.0 low=-1.0 close=-1.0 volume=-1 count=-1 WAP=-1.0 hasGaps=false

Most of these names are a column in my Postgresql db (and I can make all of them a column if necessary), but I was wondering what is the most efficient way to insert this into Postgresql?

Before I write a function to parse each title / value, I'm hoping that Postgresql has some way of handling data like this efficiently.

Can someone please shed some light?

my Postgresql version is 9.2 and my Java is 1.7

Answer 1

Postrgre doesn't have a way to do this natively (that I know of anyway), however, you can use Java's string tokenizer like this:

StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(sourceString, "= ");

while(st.hasMoreTokens()) {

  String key = st.nextToken();
  String valuse = st.nextToken();

  // Do something with the keys and values (i.e. build and execute insert statements.
} 

Where sourceString is your data string. This will delimit the string based on both the equals sign and the space between the name value pairs. Assuming that no spaces occur in the name or values in the string. If they do, then you are going to have to do some regex magic on the string before tokenizing it, depending on that can occur on the left and right hand side of the equals sign.

Then you can generate insert statement strings to be executed by the database engine.