Re: I'd like to try to add a feature - guidance needed

Daniel Heath <daniel@heath.cc> writes:
> I'd be happy to submit a patch if this sounds like a desirable feature, but I'm not really clear on the right place /
peopleto start the discussion. I'd appreciate any pointers people have as to 'the right forum' for this. 

pgsql-hackers is the right place; this is pretty off-topic for
pgsql-novice.

> I propose a 'titletext' type, which has the following properties when compared for equality:
>  * Case insensitivity (like 'citext')
>  * Only considers characters in [:alnum:] (that is, ignores spaces, punctuation, etc)

The straightforward way to do that is probably to clone contrib/citext
and modify its code for normalizing strings before comparison.

Peter Eisentraut is working[1] on allowing text collations to define their
own notions of equality (weaker than bitwise-equal), which in principle
would allow replacing citext with a special collation, and probably the
same for this idea.  However, what's involved in actually creating such a
collation, I don't know.

            regards, tom lane

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/1ccc668f-4cbc-0bef-af67-450b47cdfee7%402ndquadrant.com