Re: Proposal: new border setting in psql

On Fri, 2008-08-29 at 01:29 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> writes:
> > On Fri, 29 Aug 2008, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> You're ignoring the fact that D'Arcy's patch doesn't output valid ReST.
> >> It outputs something that might pass for ReST, but only so long as there
> >> are no special characters in the data.
>
> > I'd hate to see a focus on the corner cases drive this feature away.
>
> Hmm ... the patch works for data that contains no backslashes,
> asterisks, backquotes, vertical bars, nor underscores. Nor perhaps
> other special characters that I might've missed in one cursory scan of
> the ReST spec. I'm not sure which side of this should be considered a
> "corner case"; but I am quite certain that anyone trying to pass data
> into a ReST-reading application will soon be dissatisfied with this
> patch.

They are much more dissatisfied now, without this patch.

Escaping an occasional special character is something you have to do
anyway when writing markup. But adding rows of vertical bars and
aligning them using spaces is a much much more tedious task you really
would like to avoid.

I think the patch provides just the right gain for effort. Trying to
make it take care of all possible cases defined in ReST spec and still
output something that is esy to read as plain text would really be waste
of time.

---------------
Hannu