Re: UNICODE and PL/PGSQL

Hi Markus,
I should have said "The ICT department doesn't give me access to the psql command line interface".
Thanks for explaining what goes wrong. I now understand the problem. It doesn't solve it though.
I haven't tried your first suggestion since ASCII won't be good enough. I also need to be able to do something like
charset := charset || '\xC2\xA9';
but then in the dynamic form like
charset := charset || '\xC2\x' || to_hex(i)';
So I thought your second suggestion might be of help.
I get an error though:
ERROR: operator does not exist: character varying || bytea
HINT: No operator matches the given name and argument type(s). You may need to add explicit type casts.
CONTEXT: SQL statement "SELECT $1 || decode(to_hex( $2 ), 'hex')"

>>> Markus Schaber <schabi(at)logix-tt(dot)com> 2006-11-27 16:16 >>>

Hi, Bart,

Bart Degryse wrote:

> I suppose your statement
> test=# select '\x'||'65';
> is done on some command line interface. I don't have that. I can only
> use some client program.

All versions of PostgreSQL I know are shipped with "psql" as command
line interface. (It's a client program, actually. :-)

> I'm using EMS SQL Manager 2007 and pgAdmin III 1.3
> None of them accepts your statement.

I just tried with pgAdmin III 1.4.3, and it worked fine.

> When I try to do the same for a range of hex values ( FOR i IN 101..101
> LOOP charset := charset || '\x' || to_hex(i); ) it is not longer a
> bunch of hex values that get stored but a series of varchars.

The problem is that the \x escaping is done in the parser, so in your
first function, the query engine actually sees
"charset := charset || 'e';"

In the second function, the '\x' string is parsed as is, and converted
to the String 'x' instead of being rejected as broken \x sequence, I
think for compatibility reasons. Then, the engine sees:
"charset := charset || 'x' || to_hex(i);"

Maybe you can change it to (ASCII version):
"charset := charset || chr(i);"
or (256-bit version):
"charset := charset || decode(to_hex(i),'hex');

HTH,
Markus
--
Markus Schaber | Logical Tracking&Tracing International AG
Dipl. Inf. | Software Development GIS

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