Comments on: Outputting from Postgres to CSV

By: Ram

Ram — Mon, 24 May 2010 20:22:10 +0000

Your post was useful

Could you tell me how I can include the data in double quotes ?

\o /tmp/moocow.csv
SELECT foo,bar FROM whatever;
\o

and the output like

“foo”,”bar”
“fdata”,”bdata”
“fdata1″,”bdata2″

Appreciate your help !

sergey — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 23:54:35 +0000

try creating a view and using it instead of the query. hope this helps.

Unais — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:03:14 +0000

@Ben,

Your solution works well in version 8.4.2 and it shows a syntax error in version 8.1

copy to file command in postgresql 8.1 does not accept a query . it can copy whole table but not a query

do u have any solution for 8.1?

Ken — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:05:26 +0000

I run a lot of queries from the bash command line or from scripts, so here’s a tip:

If you run into this error: “ERROR: must be superuser to COPY to or from a file,” try this:

echo “COPY (SELECT foo from BAR) TO STDOUT with CSV HEADER” | psql -o filename.csv database_name

Michal — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:13:11 +0000

Saves so much effort looking for a simple example!

Dave — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:42:01 +0000

I also can never remember how to do this, and I always google it, and end up here. So, thank you for keeping this handy!!!

Ben — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:57:36 +0000

After much pain with line endings:

COPY (SELECT foo,bar FROM whatever) TO ‘/tmp/dump.csv’ WITH CSV HEADER