Re: Support UTF-8 files with BOM in COPY FROM

On mån, 2011-09-26 at 14:44 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> > We did recently accept a patch for psql -f to skip over a UTF-8
> > byte-order mark.  We had a lot of this same discussion there.
> 
> But that case is different, because zero-width, non-breaking space has
> no particular meaning in an SQL script - it's either going to be
> ignored as a BOM, ignored as whitespace, or an error.  But inside a
> file being subjected to COPY it might be confusable with data that the
> user wanted to end up in some table.

Yes, my point was more directed toward the discussion about whether BOM
in UTF-8 are valid at all.  But your point pretty much kills this
altogether.  If I store a BOM in row 1, column 1 of my table, because,
well, maybe it's an XML document or something, then it needs to be able
to survive a copy out and in.  The only way we could proceed with this
would be if we prohibited BOMs in all user-data.