Markus Schaber wrote:
> Hi, Eugene,
>
> Eugene E. wrote:
>
>
>>>Okay, now pass that to strcmp or a %s format. AFAIK, the
>>>"textual-form" of
>>>values is meant to be a c-string. "ab\0cd\0" is not a c-string containing
>>>ab\0cd, it's a c-string containing ab.
>>
>>WHY strcmp ?! do you really think the user is a fool ?
>>if the user declared something "binary", he obviously knows what he has
>>done.
>
>
> But when the user requests the canonical _text_ representation of a byte
> area data type, why do you consider him declaring it "binary"?
he did not request this representation. it is _by_default_
if you wish to provide it by request, please do it.
i ask you to provide minimal convertion by default, mentioned the user
wants his data unchanged.
and let the user interpret his own data himself.
>>Since this structure provides a length of each value, you have no need
>>in c-string. Why do think the user needs it ?
>
> A user that does not have a need in C-Strings can fetch the binary
> representation, getting higher efficency for all datatypes.
and lose the pretty good representation of all other columns in the same
request.
>>"textual-form" is just a name of actually existent convertion rule.
>>i am not trying to find out a philosophy here.
>
> There is no philosophy but orthogonality.
>
> There's a textual and a binary form of datatypes. For varchar, byta,
> int4, float, PostGIS geometries etc...
good. i ask you to slightly change "textual" representation of bytea.
> The text representation is pretty useful for human readers for _most_
> datatypes, the binary representation is much easier to parse for programs.
You are right.
but
Who said that i can not display something ?
i thougth, human-readability of some data depends completely on how
CLIENT-SIDE interpret it.
server do not know and should not know
what data is human readable or printable... etc.
> So use the binary representation for everything if you don't want to
> display the data to the user directly.
The problem we discuss is not about displaing or printig at all.
Some applications want "textual-form" -- most applications
but not only to display
and in the _same_ query the same applications want bytea...