How do I copy escaped tabs and new lines into Vertica?

Hi,

If I interpret your question correctly, the problem is that the \t and \n are literal strings vs. actual tab and newline chars. Vertica only allows you to have/specify a single char as a field delimiter or record terminator. It does have the provision to tell the copy that the next char is escaped using the uppercase E as illustrated below:

# here's the source file with real tab and newline chars as field and record delimiter/terminators.
[dbadmin@n4 ~]$ cat testtab.txt
1       one
2       two
3       three

# here's a copy using \t and \n which errors because they are multiple character literal strings
adserver=> copy testabload from '/home/dbadmin/testtab.txt' no escape delimiter '\t' record terminator '\n' exceptions '/home/dbadmin/testtabxept.txt';
ERROR 2730:  COPY delimiter must be a single character
# and here's the successful copy after adding the E to the delimiter and record terminator args forcing copy to treat them as operators vs. literals
adserver=> copy testabload from '/home/dbadmin/testtab.txt' no escape delimiter E'\t' record terminator E'\n' exceptions '/home/dbadmin/testtabxept.txt';
           3

# now here's what I think you may have for a file
[dbadmin@n4 ~]$ cat testslasht.txt
1\tone\n2\ttwo\n3\tthree\n

# same multiple char error
adserver=> copy testabload from '/home/dbadmin/testslasht.txt' no escape delimiter '\t' record terminator '\n' exceptions '/home/dbadmin/testslashtxept.txt';
ERROR 2730:  COPY delimiter must be a single character

# but in this case the escape E doesn't help because the chars in the file are literals not their respective operators
adserver=> copy testabload from '/home/dbadmin/testslasht.txt' no escape delimiter E'\t' record terminator E'\n' exceptions '/home/dbadmin/testslashtxept.txt';
           0
# and here's the exceptions file showing that it didn't interpret the file content as delimited
adserver=> \! cat /home/dbadmin/testslashtxept.txt
COPY: Input record 1 has been rejected (Invalid integer format '1\tone\n2\ttwo\n3\tthree\n' for column 1 (c1)).  Please see /home/dbadmin/adserver/v_adserver_node0001_catalog/CopyErrorLogs/testabload-testslasht.txt-copy-from-rejected-data, record 1 for the rejected record.
COPY: Loaded 0 rows, rejected 1 rows.

So you may have to preprocess the file using sed or awk to convert the "\t" and "\n" to real tab and newline chars

[dbadmin@n4 ~]$ cat testslasht.txt
1\tone\n2\ttwo\n3\tthree\n

[dbadmin@n4 ~]$ cat testslasht.txt | sed -e 's/\\t/     /g' -e 's/\\n/\n/g'
1       one
2       two
3       three

I hope it helps.