So, I needed a way to sort using collation rules other than the one the
database was built with. So I wrote up the following function exposing strxfrm
with an extra parameter to specify the LC_COLLATE value to use.
This is my first C function so I'm really unsure that I've done the right
thing. For the most part I pattern-matched off the string_io code in the
contrib directory.
In particular I'm unsure about the code postgres-interfacing code in
c_varcharxfrm which makes an extra copy of both parameters that are passed in
and an extra copy of the result value. Are varchars guaranteed to be
nul-terminated? If so I can dispose of two of the copies. And I can probably
eliminate the copying of the result by alloting extra space when I allocate it
initially.
But more generally. Would it make more sense to use text or bytea or something
else to store these opaque binary strings? At least with glibc they tend to be
unreadable anyways.
Other caveats: It's condemned to be permanently non-threadsafe because the
whole locale system is a non thread-safe API. Also I fear some systems will
leak memory like a sieve when you call setlocale a few thousand times instead
of the 1 time at initialization that they foresaw. At least glibc doesn't seem
to leak in my brief testing.
If it's deemed a reasonable approach and nobody has any fatal flaws then I
expect it would be useful to put in the contrib directory?
--
greg