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up vote 0 down vote favorite

I have a table in Postgres with only 2 columns

CREATE table dummy(col1 char(10), col2 char(10));

The CSV file has the following columns:

gid        prov             name        pop1996
4468       BC              VANCOUVER    514008
4501       BC               SURREY      304477
4473       BC               BURNABY     179209
4485       BC               RICHMOND    148867

How can I copy gid and name only from this file using \COPY?

share|improve this question
1  
Probably duplicate of stackoverflow.com/questions/12618232/… – Jan Marek Apr 21 at 11:59
up vote 0 down vote

If you don't mind creating other tables you can follow the Q/A @Jan Marek pointed out: http://stackoverflow.com/a/12619903/318174

If you can't create additional tables than you can do this:

You will need to preprocess the CSV file first by eliminating the columns you don't want. The easiest way is using UNIX cut.

cat file.csv | cut -d '\t' 1,3 > processed.csv

If your CSV file has some escaping needed you can use a python script I wrote a long time ago that is exactly like cut but respects CSV.

cat file.csv | csvcut.py -d '\t' 1,3 > processed.csv

Next you load up psql and enter:

\copy your_table (col1,col2) FROM '/path/to/processed.csv' DELIMITER '\t' CSV;
share|improve this answer
    
Is there a way of doing it with windows command prompt ? – Nidhi Apr 21 at 12:17
    
Python installs on windows so you can use my python script. – Adam Gent Apr 21 at 12:17
    
Oh you will still need to pipe the csv file to the python script. Well I recommend if you haven't already install Powershell, Cygwin, Babun or Gow. Once you do that open the better shell and run the command. – Adam Gent Apr 21 at 12:22
    
Is there a way out, If i don't want to install anything new ? – Nidhi Apr 21 at 12:36

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