Escaping

There are two reserved characters that have special meaning to HAWQ:

  • The designated delimiter character separates columns or fields in the data file.
  • The newline character designates a new row in the data file.

If your data contains either of these characters, you must escape the character so that HAWQ treats it as data and not as a field separator or new row. By default, the escape character is a \ (backslash) for text-formatted files and a double quote (“) for csv-formatted files.