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

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Tatsuo Ishii <ishii@postgresql.org>, david@kineticode.com, itagaki.takahiro@gmail.com, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2011-09-26T17:28:15Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> The thing that makes me doubt that is this comment from Tatsuo Ishii:
> TI> COPY explicitly specifies the encoding (to be UTF-8 in this case).  So
> TI> I think we should not regard U+FEFF as "BOM" in COPY, rather we should
> TI> regard U+FEFF as "ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE".

Yeah, that's a reasonable argument for rejecting the patch altogether.
I'm not qualified to decide whether it outweighs the "we need to be able
to read Notepad output" argument.  I do observe that
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark
says Unicode 3.2 has deprecated the no-break-space interpretation,
but on the other hand you're right that we can't really assume that
the character is not present in people's data.

			regards, tom lane