Escape handling in strings

On Tuesday June 21 2005 12:49 pm, Bruce Momjian wrote:

I have received very few replies to my suggestion that we
implement E'' for escaped strings, so eventually, after a few
major releases, we can have '' treat backslashes literally
like the SQL standard requires.

I assume this is because most people say, "yea, it is going to
be a pain, and yea, we should probably do it".

I read the webpage, but its still a little muddy. Can you
clarify/summarize the class of applications, and which dumps
starting with 7.2*, will fail on clusters with this patch unless
they are modified?

Ed

Ed L. wrote:

On Tuesday June 21 2005 12:49 pm, Bruce Momjian wrote:

I have received very few replies to my suggestion that we
implement E'' for escaped strings, so eventually, after a few
major releases, we can have '' treat backslashes literally
like the SQL standard requires.

I assume this is because most people say, "yea, it is going to
be a pain, and yea, we should probably do it".

I read the webpage, but its still a little muddy. Can you
clarify/summarize the class of applications, and which dumps
starting with 7.2*, will fail on clusters with this patch unless
they are modified?

Well, postgresql.conf controls the warnings, until perhaps 8.3 where a
backslash in a string becomes literal, and \n is treated as \ and n, and
\\ is treated as \ and \, and \' is treated as \ and the end of the
string, and the rest of the string is part of the query, which is really
bad.

So, move \' to '', and when you get to 8.3 you need to use E'' for
escapes.

Dumps from releases before 8.1 might have problems loading in the CREATE
statements, but the COPY format is the same as before.

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