Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2023 16:15:06 -0500
From: Nico Williams <nico@cryptonector.com>
To: Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com>
Cc: Chapman Flack <chap@anastigmatix.net>,
	Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Pre-proposal: unicode normalized text
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On Wed, Oct 04, 2023 at 01:38:15PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Wed, 2023-10-04 at 14:02 -0400, Chapman Flack wrote:
> > The SQL standard would have me able to:
> > 
> > [...]
> > _UTF8'Hello, world!' and _LATIN1'Hello, world!'
> 
> Is there a use case for that? UTF-8 is able to encode any unicode code
> point, it's relatively compact, and it's backwards-compatible with 7-
> bit ASCII. If you have a variety of text data in your system (and in
> many cases even if not), then UTF-8 seems like the right solution.
> 
> Text data encoded 17 different ways requires a lot of bookkeeping in
> the type system, and it also requires injecting a bunch of fallible
> transcoding operators around just to compare strings.

Better that than TEXT blobs w/ the encoding given by the `CREATE
DATABASE` or `initdb` default!

It'd be a lot _less_ fragile to have all text tagged with an encoding
(indirectly, via its type which then denotes the encoding).

That would be a lot of work, but starting with just a UTF-8 text type
would be an improvement.

Nico
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