Andrew Pennebaker <andrew.pennebaker@gmail.com> writes: > I can't find a relevant section to address my specific problem: ecpg > complaining when I try to check the syntax of my .sql files that use input > parameters.
I'm not sure why you think that should work. psql and ecpg have quite distinct input languages. Both are extensions of SQL, but the key word there is "extension". ecpg certainly isn't going to accept psql's backslash commands for instance, any more than psql would accept ecpg's C code portions. And I doubt it would be useful for ecpg to simply ignore the variable-interpolation symbols; but it has no way to know what's going to be substituted for those symbols.
It would be more interesting to consider giving psql a syntax-check-only mode; though I'm afraid use of variable interpolation would still be pretty problematic, since the variables are commonly filled from execution of previous commands.