Richard_D_Levine@raytheon.com writes:
> Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote on 10/20/2005 03:11:23 PM:
>> The hard part would be in figuring out how
>> the output routine could know how many spaces to add back.
> The length is in the metadata for the column, or am I being dense?
The output routine hasn't got access to that metadata. In general,
in fact, a random Datum can't be linked to any column since it may have
been generated on-the-fly.
It'd be easy if we stuck the column width into the stored representation
of bpchar, but this would defeat one of the purposes, ie, to make the
stored representations of text and bpchar alike.
regards, tom lane