Re: pgbench - allow backslash-continuations in custom scripts

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 3:01 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Um, why exactly? That psql behavior is of really ancient standing, and
>> we have not had complaints about it.

> I think that's mostly because the psql metacommands are ridiculously
> impoverished. I'm guessing that pgbench's expression language is
> eventually going to support strings as a data type, for example, and
> those strings might want to contain backlashes.

Sure, but once we define strings, they'll be quoted, and the behavior
can/should/will be different for a backslash inside quotes than one
outside them --- as it is already in psql. Moreover, if you're on
board with the backslash-newline proposal, you've already bought into
the idea that backslashes outside quotes will behave differently from
those inside.

>> Shall I make a patch that allows backslash-newline to be handled this way
>> in both psql and pgbench backslash commands?

> I certainly don't object to such a patch, although if it's between you
> writing that patch and you getting Tomas Vondra's multivariate
> statistics stuff committed, I'll take the latter. :-)

I'll get to that, but I'd like to get this area fully dealt with before
context-swapping to that one.

regards, tom lane