Unquoted carriage return found in data - Preventing COPY FROM in PostgreSQL

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The easiest way I found to solve this in MAC -El Capitan is:

1) Open the file with Sublime Text
2) in menu Reopen the file with encoding UTF8
3) in menu Save the file with encoding UTF8

Sublime "normalize" all end of line EOF.

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mmTmmR
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mmTmmR

Updated on June 22, 2022

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  • mmTmmR
    mmTmmR almost 2 years

    I am trying to import a large csv file (~4.5gb) into Postgres but it keeps throwing the following error:

    ERROR: unquoted carriage return found in data
    HINT: Use quoted CSV field to represent carriage return.
    CONTEXT: COPY abc_complete_file_261115, line 9041959

    I opened my csv in SublimeText2 and jumped to line 9041959, found the URN for record I needed, loaded the file in Vim and went to that line. I have hidden characters enabled in Vim (by using :set list) so I would expect to see a carriage return ^M somewhere on the line within the data but the only one I could find is at the end of the line as expected.

    After an entire day of research and having gotten no further with this issue I ended up deleting the record on line 9041959 - this didn't fix the issue.

    Then I figured well maybe it's something strange going on between records - so I ended up deleting about 5 records on either side of the line that threw the error - but it gave the the same error again. (I'll worry about preserving the data later on, right now I'm just trying to import the file so that I can have a look in Postgres). I made sure that I had saved the changes to the csv file before rerunning my query but it just gave the same error.

    I feel like I am missing something really really obvious - does anyone have any ideas what might be causing the issue?

    I'm using a Mac running El Capitan.

    Many thanks

    Update 27/11/15

    Hi @JakubKania. Sorry for not putting up the query - the reason I didn't was because I am 99.9% sure that the issue is to do with the csv file rather than the query. A generalised version is:

    CREATE TABLE large_file_test(
    urn VARCHAR,
    forename CHAR(32),
    surname CHAR(32));
    COPY large_file_test FROM '/Users/Shared/largefile1.csv' (FORMAT CSV, DELIMITER ',', HEADER, ENCODING LATIN1);
    COPY large_file_test FROM '/Users/Shared/largefile2.csv' (FORMAT CSV, DELIMITER ',', HEADER, ENCODING LATIN1);
    COPY large_file_test FROM '/Users/Shared/largefile3.csv' (FORMAT CSV, DELIMITER ',', HEADER, ENCODING LATIN1);
    ALTER TABLE large_file_test
    ADD CONSTRAINT large_urn
    PRIMARY KEY (large_urn);
    ANALYZE large_file_test;
    

    So I am actually trying to load 3 separate files into the Table that I created. The issue is that there seems to be hidden characters in part 1 that are preventing it from importing into Postgres. I haven't tried anything with part 2 or 3 yet.