Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2020 13:49:55 -0300
From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Arthur Zakirov <zaartur@gmail.com>,
	Juan =?iso-8859-1?Q?Jos=E9_Santamar=EDa?= Flecha
 <juanjo.santamaria@gmail.com>,
	Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com>,
	PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Allow to_date() and to_timestamp() to accept localized names
Message-ID: <20200123164955.GA23074@alvherre.pgsql>
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On 2020-Jan-23, Tom Lane wrote:

> That particular case could be improved by stopping at a dash ... but
> since this code is also used to match strings like "A.M.", we can't
> just exclude punctuation in general.  Breaking at whitespace seems
> like a reasonable compromise.

Yeah, and there are cases where dashes are used in names -- browsing
through glibc for example I quickly found Akan, for which the month names are:

mon  "Sanda-<U0186>p<U025B>p<U0254>n";/
     "Kwakwar-<U0186>gyefuo";/
     "Eb<U0254>w-<U0186>benem";/

and so on.  Even whitespace is problematic for some languages, such as Afan,

mon      "Qunxa Garablu";/
         "Naharsi Kudo";/
         "Ciggilta Kudo";/
(etc) but I think whitespace-splitting is going to be more comprehensible
in the vast majority of cases, even if not perfect.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera                https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services