DELIMITERS

You can easily change the default tab column delimiter. COPY's USING DELIMITERS option allows you to set the column delimiter. In Figure , setting the delimiter to a pipe symbol (|) causes the output file to use pipes to separate columns.  

        test=> COPY copytest TO '/tmp/copytest.out' USING DELIMITERS '|';
        COPY
        test=> \q
        $ cat /tmp/copytest.out
        1|23.99|fresh spring water|t
        2|55.23|bottled soda|t  

If a COPY file does not use the default tab  column delimiter, COPY...FROM must employ the proper USING DELIMITERS option. As shown in Figure , if a file uses pipes rather than tabs as column delimiters, COPY...FROM must specify pipes as delimiters.  

        test=> DELETE FROM copytest;
        DELETE 2
        test=>
        test=> COPY copytest FROM '/tmp/copytest.out';
        ERROR:  copy: line 1, pg_atoi: error in "1|23.99|fresh spring water|t": cannot parse "|23.99|fresh spring water|t"
        test=>
        test=> COPY copytest FROM '/tmp/copytest.out' USING DELIMITERS '|';
        COPY  

The first COPY...FROM fails because it cannot find a tab to separate the columns. The second COPY...FROM succeeds because the proper delimiter for the file was used.