Re: Escape handling in COPY, strings, psql

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > I am thinking the only clean solution is to add a special keyword
> > like ESCAPE before strings that contain escape information. I
> > think a GUC is too general. You know if the string is a constant
> > if it contains escapes just by looking at it, and if it is a
> > variable, hopefully you know if it has escapes.

I do support gradually phasing out backslash escapes in standard string
literals in the interest of portability. Most of the current escape
sequences are of limited value anyway. Let's think about ways to get
there:

Enabling escape sequences in string literals controls the formatting of
input (and output?) data, so it is akin to, say, the client encoding
and the date style, so a GUC variable isn't out of the question in my
mind. It makes most sense, though, if we want to eventually make users
switch it off all the time, that is, as a transition aid. But before
that can happen, we need to come up with an alternative mechanism to
enter weird characters.

One such way may be to provide functions (say, chr(), tab(), etc.) to
give access to unprintable characters, but that will result in terrible
performance for long strings and it also won't help with COPY or places
where only literals are allowed.

Another way would be to allow escape sequences only in specially marked
strings. The proposal above doing 'foo' ESCAPE 'x' seems fairly
elegant for SQL linguists but would be pretty weird to implement in the
lexer. It won't help with COPY either, but that is really the case for
all solutions.

A more compact represenation may be using a prefix letter, like E'foo'.
This fits the SQL syntax, is familiar with Python programmers (although
in the other direction), and can be implemented efficiently in the
lexer. I like that the best, personally.

For COPY, we would probably have to use a flag in the COPY command
itself either way (like already done for NULL AS).

Comments? Other ideas? Keep the escapes?

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/