From: Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com>
To: Chris Travers <chris@travelamericas.com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Dean Gibson (DB Administrator) <postgresql4@ultimeth.com>
Cc: pgsql-sql <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Blank-padding
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 09:32:49 -0500
Message-ID: <1130164369.15546.80.camel@state.g2switchworks.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4359D081.7080105@travelamericas.com>
References: <CC1CF380F4D70844B01D45982E671B239E8BEC@mtxexch01.add0.masergy.com>
<878xwokk4d.fsf@charter.net>
<20051020214518.Q1006@ganymede.hub.org>
<33c6269f0510210716x474dae2ah3861d32d8db01602@mail.gmail.com>
<23805.1129913241@sss.pgh.pa.us>
<435979B0.60107@ultimeth.com>
<27840.1129951428@sss.pgh.pa.us>
<4359D081.7080105@travelamericas.com>
On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 00:39, Chris Travers wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>
> >"Dean Gibson (DB Administrator)" <postgresql4@ultimeth.com> writes:
> >
> >
> >>I remember that discussion, and I was for the change. However, upon
> >>doing some testing after reading the above, I wonder if the
> >>blank-stripping isn't too aggressive. I have a CHAR(6) field (say,
> >>named Z) that has "abc " in it. Suppose I want to append "x" to Z,
> >>with any leading spaces in Z PRESERVED.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >(You meant trailing spaces, I assume.) Why exactly would you want to do
> >that? You decided by your choice of datatype that the trailing spaces
> >weren't significant.
> >
> I once built a telecom billing app where this might be important (fixed
> length fields). Lets say you have fixed length fields defined as
> char(n) datatypes. You may want to build a query to generate billing
> records like:
> select field1 || field2 || field3 || field4 || field5 ... AS bill_record
> FROM lec_billing_entries;
>
> It seels to me that I would expect trailing spaces to be preserved in
> these cases. Having an implicit rtrim function is asking for problems.
> Personally I would rather have to call rtrim explicitly than have the
> backend treat the concatenation differently than if I do it on the client.
If I rememberate correctificantly, this problem is or was caused by the
|| operator using the same internal logic for varchar / text AND char.
Tom, is it reasonable / doable to have || have a different set of
internal functions for each of those types.
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To: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
Cc: smarlowe@g2switchworks.com, chris@travelamericas.com, tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us, postgresql4@ultimeth.com
Subject: Re: Blank-padding
In-Reply-To: <1130164369.15546.80.camel@state.g2switchworks.com>
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