[IMPALA-1840] impala-shell always treats tab as column boundaries and adds delimiter

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Affects Version/s: Product Backlog
• Component/s: Clients
• Labels: impala-shell ramp-up shell
• Target Version: Product Backlog
• Assignee: Zoltan Ivanfi
• Reporter: Ippokratis Pandis
• Created: 05/Mar/15 00:21
• Updated: 14/Jun/17 21:01
• Resolved: 23/Sep/16 16:36

Description

From the user list:

In debugging some issues exporting csv data I caught an interesting edge case in impala-shell. Apparently any time you have a tab in a string, shell decides it's a column boundary and adds a delimiter regardless of what your delimiter choice was. I suppose behind the scenes it's doing something like producing tab delimited strings then remapping the tabs to your delimiter of choice, because that's the best explanation I can think of for this behavior

Sample:

$ bin/impala-shell.sh --quiet -B --output_delimiter ":" -q 'select "ab", "cd"'
ab:cd

$ bin/impala-shell.sh --quiet -B --output_delimiter ":" -q $'select "a\tb", "cd"'
a:b:cd

Issue Links

• is related to: IMPALA-116 The impala shell should take of strings with tabs for output formatting.
• relates to: IMPALA-2998 impala-shell -B and --output_delimiter does not work if string contains delimiter or TABs