Re: How to covert 'char' to 'inet'

If you are using IP addresses then Postgres has some really nice IP 
related datatypes and functions such as INET

I would definately be inclined to use these instead of char() and 
varchar().

Darren

On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 24, 2002 at 01:40:01AM -0700, Michal O wrote:
> > Thank you. What I did was:
> > 
> >   inet(trim(both ' ' from server_ip::text))
> > 
> > and worked fine. Convertion to 'text' was needed.
> > Do you know how time consuming it is ? Is there more efficient way ?
> 
> No, as I say, char() is padded, and spaces (or whatever) are not
> legal in IP addresses.  So, if you have a char field with data
> 10.0.0.1, its actual representation is something more like
> '10.0.0.1_______', where '_' is the padding.  This is the same
> problem you would have if you inserted the char() field into a
> newly-created varchar() field: you'd get the padded text instead. 
> That's a reason to avoid using char() for most cases, unless you know
> that the field will _always_ be the same length.
> 
> A
> 
> 

-- 
Darren Ferguson