Re: psql JSON output format

On Tue, 2024-01-23 at 16:36 +0100, Christoph Berg wrote:
> Re: Laurenz Albe
> > I am kind of unhappy about this change.  It seems awkward and undesirable
> > so have JSON values decorated with weird quoting in JSON output.
> > I understand the motivation, but I bet it's not what will make users
> > happy.
>
> Well, why stop at JSON, and not represent any array type as a JSON
> array? Compound types could be transformed into JSON objects. Custom
> data types could add hooks for their own custom JSON representation.
>
> I'd just stop the flood right before it starts...

I'd stop the flood right after json/jsonb.

Arrays as database columns are probably too rare to be a real issue.

> The real reason I'd not want to go that route is because I need the
> format to be round-trip safe for the "\gedit" patch, see the other
> thread. We would have to transform JSON sub-parts back into PG's text
> format. But there were already complaints that other patch is complex.
> At the moment it's just strcmp-ing the text value before and after,
> which is straighforward.

I don't particularly care about \gedit, any I think \gedit shouldn't
be the raison d'être for this patch.

I cannot imagine that anybody who wants to move data from PostgreSQL
to PostgreSQL will use \gedit, load the output from psql into the
editor and save. After all, there is COPY and pg_dump.

I'm pretty certain that people are more likely to use psql's JSON
output format to move data somewhere else.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe