Bytea docs (was Re: [PATCHES] bytea datatype documentation patch)

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Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> I feel that basing the whole discussion on what "ASCII" characters can be
> stored, are nonprintable, must be escaped, etc. is not appropriate.
> Bytea doesn't store characters, it stores bytes (or octets, as you wish).
> The correspondence between bytes and characters is old-fashioned and
> pretty much does not exist in SQL except for a few places such as
> OCTET_LENGTH.
>
> Conversely, the discussion about whether text should be able to cope with
> zero bytes is nonsensical because text stores characters and not bytes.
>
> So I would base this discussion on the premise "bytea stores binary data"
> (insert examples).

Thanks for the input, Peter.

I was struggling to come up with a better way to say, for example "ASCII
value XX", that would be clear to the reader. Do you think referring to
"bytes of decimal value XX" is better?

I'll take another stab at this with your guidance in mind.

>
> Some stylistic issues:
>
> bytea => <type>bytea</type>
>
> NULLs => zero bytes/bytes of value zero ("NULL" is too overloaded)
>
> 'non-printable' => <quote>nonprintable</quote>
>
> MUST => <emphasis>must</emphasis>
>

Good input -- I'll fix these too.

Thanks!

-- Joe