Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> How do people feel about having tabs displayed as 0x09? Should they be
> a literal tab?
If they're a literal tab they'll mess up the formatting that we just so
painstakingly put in. I'd personally vote for \t rather than \x09, but
other than that I agree with doing something like this in formatted
psql output.
OTOH ... there's a rather nasty problem with this whole concept, which
is that you can't readily tell whether the data was a tab or the actual
string "\x09". The only way to make it unambiguous would be to start
doubling backslashes, which I think is a complete nonstarter on
backwards compatibility grounds :-(
regards, tom lane