Re: BUG #13736: pg_dump should use E'' quotes

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 6:05 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> "David G. Johnston" <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 5:33 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> >> Yes. For one thing, there would immediately be zero chance of loading
> >> view definitions produced by pg_dump into any other DBMS,
>
> > Ironic...​we cannot write a standard conforming string out because we are
> > concerned other databases will be unable to read it.
>
> Hm? The E'' syntax would specifically *not* be standard conforming.
>

​I apparently always mis-understood what it was getting at...​

From this I gather that standard conforming strings do not have any concept
of
​slash-​
escaping
​, just the​
doubling-up the uni-quote
​,​
and so we introduced a non-standard version with an "E" prefix that
maintains the escaping behavior previously allowed?

I think part of my confusing was assuming that the normal was to allow
slash-escaping...which if we are outputting such in order to expect
external tools to accept the data for input would seem to be a reasonable
assumption.

David J.
​