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"Billy G. Allie" <Bill.Allie@mug.org> writes:

I have a question about the behavior of the array input routine. How should
the input string, '{abc"def,defghi",jklmnop}' be parsed? I would think it
should produce '{"abc\"def","defghi\"","jklmnop"}', but it currently (as of
7.3) produces '{"abcdef,defghi","jklmnop"}'.

As did 7.2. Previous releases (at least back to 7.0, the oldest I have
handy to test) did this:

regression=# select '{abc"def,defghi",jklmnop}'::text[];
?column?
--------------------------
{"def,defghi","jklmnop"}
(1 row)

which is certainly pretty bogus, but it established the precedent that a
double-quoted string could be a substring of an array element, and more
specifically that double-quote didn't stop being special just because it
wasn't the first character of the element string.

Which should be the correct behavior?

I can't see any strong argument in favor of your proposed change. I can
tell you that we will get beat up about it if we change anything in this
line --- so you'd better muster a pretty strong argument.

regards, tom lane