Re: Arbitrary whitespace restrictions on range types

On 18 December 2012 23:31, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
> Jeff, Hackers:
>
> Is there a strong reason why this has to error?

Having taken a look at the range I/O routines, I surmise that it was
just easier to write range_parse() such that whitespace is included
within <string> tokens:

 * Whitespace before or after <range> is ignored.  Whitespace within a <string>
 * is taken literally and becomes part of the input string for that bound.

I think that escaping the underlying literal values for parsing is a
surprisingly difficult task, so I can see why the implementation would
shrug in this case. This behaviour may be astonishing, but that
doesn't make it a POLA violation. I don't have time to check now, but
I'm pretty sure that doing something else would break a whole bunch of
other common cases.

--
Peter Geoghegan       http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services