Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2020 16:47:53 -0400
From: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
To: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
Cc: "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>,
	Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Michael L Perry <michael@qedcode.com>,
	pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: 9.4. String Functions and Operators page does not document that
 encode adds line breaks
Message-ID: <20200316204753.GB22592@momjian.us>
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 <20200227183256.GA30538@alvherre.pgsql>
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On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 03:32:56PM -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> On 2020-Feb-09, David G. Johnston wrote:
> 
> > Stating direct RFC4648 compliance would require us to drop the line breaks
> > that are only being added due to using MIME rules which ideally our general
> > encoding function would not do.  Greenfield we probably would want base64
> > to be general RFC4648 and add something like base64-mime which performs the
> > line breaking for the user per RFC 2045, base64-pem which would use that
> > specific environments RFC rules.  Now, maybe we can add "base64-4648" or
> > "base64-general" while leaving "base64" alone and using the MIME version of
> > the rules?
> 
> Patches welcome.
> 
> I'm not sure that we *need* to preserve the historical behavior.  Many
> people would probably be okay with encode('base64') returning no
> newlines (since they are useless most of the time anyway), and the
> minority that does can use encode('base64-rfc2045').
> 
> Another idea might be to add an optional 'flags' option to encode(),
> which are given to the encoder/decoder functions.

I have had this force-wrap problem using Linux command-line tools.  You
can see it when using xxd here on page 54:

	https://momjian.us/main/writings/tls.pdf#page=54

xxd allows you to specify a maximum length, so I used -cols 999 to avoid
the wrap.  Other times I used a tool to remove the newlines from the
output.  I think you should just use the existing Postgres SQL string
functions to remove the newlines.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        https://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                             https://enterprisedb.com

+ As you are, so once was I.  As I am, so you will be. +
+                      Ancient Roman grave inscription +