How to specify a tab in a postgres front-end COPY

Question

I would like to use the psql \"\\copy\" command to pull data from a tab-delimited file into Postgres. I\'m using this command:

\\copy cm_state from \'state.         


        

Answer 1

Use E'\t' to tell postgresql there may be escaped characters in there:

\copy cm_state from 'state.data' with delimiter E'\t' null as ;

Answer 2

you can do this copy cm_state from stdin with (format 'text')