"Postgres User" <postgres.developer@gmail.com> writes:
> My users are developers and the goal was to accept a simple
> comma-delimited list of string values as a function's input parameter.
> The function would then parse this input param into a valid regex
> expression.
Why are you fixated on this being a regex? If you aren't actually
trying to expose regex capabilities to the users, you'll just be having
to suppress a bunch of strange behaviors for special characters.
ISTM that the best solution is to use an array-of-text parameter,
along the lines of
where name = any (array['Smith', 'Jones', ...])
For what you're doing, you'd not actually want the array[] syntax,
it would look more like
where name = any ('{Smith,Jones}'::text[])
This should optimize into an indexscan in 8.2 or later.
regards, tom lane