CASSANDRA-21415: Document COPY TO limitation for control characters in text columns#4856
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…n text columns COPY TO does not support control characters in text column values per RFC 4180. This patch documents the limitation in the cqlsh reference, including the security risks and alternative tools for data migration. patch by Arvind Kandpal; reviewed by TBD for CASSANDRA-21415
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Hi @bschoening , updated the title and description for the new jira ticket and also update the suggested changes. |
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Pull request overview
This PR updates the Cassandra documentation to clearly describe a known limitation of cqlsh COPY TO: text values containing control/non-printable characters do not round-trip correctly through CSV export/import.
Changes:
- Adds a
NOTEadmonition under theCOPY TOdocumentation describing the control-character round-trip corruption behavior. - Suggests alternative migration tools for data containing such characters.
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COPY TO does not support control characters (such as newlines, carriage
returns, or null bytes) in text column values. Any text column containing
these characters will be silently corrupted on round-trip — COPY TO
succeeds and COPY FROM succeeds, but the re-imported values differ from
the originals.
This patch documents that limitation clearly in the COPY TO section of
the cqlsh reference, in accordance with RFC 4180 which defines CSV
TEXTDATA as printable characters only. Users with such data are directed
to sstableloader for data migration instead.
patch by Arvind Kandpal; reviewed by for CASSANDRA-21415