Re: Summary: what to do about INET/CIDR

Tom Lane writes:

> 3. The function host(inet) will return a text representation of
> just the IP part of an INET or CIDR value, eg, "127.1.0.0".
> All four octets will always appear, the netmask will never appear.
> (This is the same as its current behavior, I think.)

I think there was definite merit in the host() function returning inet, as
you originally proposed (if only for consistency with the proposed changes
to network() and broadcast()).

A separate function for formatting output seems necessary, but if we don't
reach an agreement though, it ought to work to cast CIDR to INET to get
all four octets, no?

> 4. A new function text(inet) will return a text representation of
> both the IP and netmask parts of an INET or CIDR value, eg,
> "127.1.0.0/16". Unlike the default display conversions, all four
> octets and the netmask length will always appear in the result.
> Note that the system will consider this function to be a typecast,
> so the same result can be gotten with inetval::text or
> CAST(inetval AS text).

I think the typecast-to-text representation of CIDR should be visually the
same as the normal representation.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net http://yi.org/peter-e/