PostgreSQL's pg_dump with COPY statements format is the most effective way to backup and restore your database. However for retrieving specific data or to inject dump into non-PostgreSQL database, INSERT commands are far more convenient. This tool simply converts COPY dumps to INSERT dumps.

This tool is written in Rust language. Install it, then type:

cargo install

Just pipe dump output to pg-dump2insert:

cat dump.sql | pg-dump2insert

If the dump file is a binary archive, use pg_restore:

pg_restore dump.db | pg-dump2insert
pg_restore -t tablenamedump.db | pg-dump2insert

The only difference with "--inserts" dumps is that all numeric values are quoted in INSERTs (which is permitted in PostgreSQL), i.e.:

INSERT INTO tablename (id, ...) VALUES ('2', ...);

A (5 times slower) Python version is also provided.