Copy contents of a Unix File to Postgres Table column

First the table:

# CREATE TABLE test_table(id serial, value text); -- notice id type serial
CREATE TABLE

Then, let's add a random attribute to an element (just to demonstrate quotes in the content):

$ cat file
<address>
   <street some="attribute">Main Street</street><!--attribute here-->
   <city>New York</city>
   <country>USA</country>
</address>

Now some awk to slurp in the whole file, to duplicate all double quotes in the content and to add (or replace all) double quotes to the beginning and end:

$ awk '                   # tested with gawk, mawk and awk version 20121220
BEGIN {
    RS="^$"               # slurp in the whole file
}
{
    gsub(/"/,"\"\"")      # double the double quotes
    # gsub(/\r?\n/,"")    # to remove newlines, uncomment (untested)
    gsub(/^"*|"*$/,"\"")  # add quotes to the beginning and end
    print                 # output
}' file

Output with above awk (notice "s in the beginning and the end and ""s in the middle):

"<address>
   <street some=""attribute"">Main Street</street>
   <city>New York</city>
   <country>USA</country>
</address>
"

Now to process the file with awk and to feed it's output to psql:

$ awk 'BEGIN{RS="^$"}{gsub(/"/,"\"\"");gsub(/^"*|"*$/,"\"");print}' file |
> psql -h host -d dbname -c "\copy test_table(value) from '/dev/stdin' csv" -U username
Password: 
COPY 1

And finally:

# select * from test_table ;
 id |                      value                       
----+--------------------------------------------------
  1 | <address>                                       +
    |    <street some="attribute">Main Street</street>+
    |    <city>New York</city>                        +
    |    <country>USA</country>                       +
    | </address>                                      +
    | 
(1 row)

This was tested in Linux using Bash shell.