Re: BUG #15474: Special character escape sequences need better documentation, or more easily found documentation

tl;dr: If this is just an RTFM moment, then I'm happy to chalk it up to
that and move on with my life. :)

I'm coming from a background of devops (mostly python/C++), not database
administration, so this may be something that's fairly straightforward for
a different audience - but this wasn't clear to me as someone who's coming
into it from the outside. An obscure stackoverflow answer is where I
landed how to fix it rather than being able to find it in the
documentation, so I figured I'd submit it as an improvement request. If
I'm super off base on it not being clear, then feel free to close - but I
felt like the point of documentation is that it should answer those kinds
of questions rather than googling other places. Even just a link to the
documentation for those would be very helpful as a "Looking for this? It's
<here>" for the special character documentation that David mentioned would
have been extremely helpful IMHO.

On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 10:51 AM Andrew Gierth <andrew(at)tao11(dot)riddles(dot)org(dot)uk>
wrote:

> >>>>> "PG" == PG Bug reporting form <noreply(at)postgresql(dot)org> writes:
>
> PG> A simple table elaborating on the escapes for each special
> PG> character would be incredibly helpful at determining how to
> PG> translate those escapes for cleaning strings prior to insertion so
> PG> those of us using postgresql can quickly write cleaning functions
> PG> for data.
>
> If you're "writing cleaning functions" you're already making a serious
> mistake, because you should be passing data values as parameters (which
> do not require escapes) rather than interpolating into the query string.
>
> If you actually do need to interpolate into the query string for some
> reason (like doing COPY or other utility statement that doesn't support
> parameters), then you should be using the quote/escape functions
> provided by the driver for your client language (e.g. in libpq there is
> PQescapeStringConn).
>
> --
> Andrew (irc:RhodiumToad)
>

--
Mike Taylor
bubthegreat(at)gmail(dot)com
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