Re: PL/Perl Does not Like vstrings

On Jan 5, 2012, at 9:41 AM, Tom Lane wrote:

> I would imagine you could reproduce it by returning the same kinds of
> objects as function results, since the actual problem is in utf8 to
> database-encoding conversion.
>
>> No segfault, at least, though that‚s a rather bizarre error message. AFAIK, $^V isn‚t a hash. This works, though:
>> spi_query_prepared($plan, v1);
>
> Is that actually a vstring? I confess I'd never heard of the things
> before this thread, but I remember reading somewhere that you need
> multiple dots in a string before it's considered a vstring and not
> something else.

Yes, it is. You can declare v-strings either by prepending a "v" to one or more dot-separated integers, or just 3 or more dotted integers.

http://austin.pm.org/presentations/march2000/raty/vstrings.html

I believe the latter syntax is deprecated, though; it turned out to be confusing and pretty roundly hated. It's preferred to use the v syntax.

Best,

David