Re: What is the maximum encoding-conversion growth rate, anyway?

> I just rearranged the code in mbutils.c a little bit to make it more
> robust if conversion of an over-length string is attempted, and noted
> this comment:
> 
> /*
>  * When converting strings between different encodings, we assume that space
>  * for converted result is 4-to-1 growth in the worst case. The rate for
>  * currently supported encoding pairs are within 3 (SJIS JIS X0201 half width
>  * kanna -> UTF8 is the worst case).  So "4" should be enough for the moment.
>  *
>  * Note that this is not the same as the maximum character width in any
>  * particular encoding.
>  */
> #define MAX_CONVERSION_GROWTH  4
> 
> It strikes me that this is overly pessimistic, since we do not support
> 5- or 6-byte UTF8 characters, and AFAICS there are no 1-byte characters
> in any supported encoding that require 4 bytes in another.  Could we
> reduce the multiplier to 3?  Or even 2?  This has a direct impact on the
> longest COPY lines we can support, so I'd like it not to be larger than
> necessary.

I'm afraid we have to mke it larger, rather than smaller for 8.3. For
example 0x82f5 in SHIFT_JIS_2004 (new in 8.3) becomes *pair* of 3
bytes UTF_8 (0x00e3818b and 0x00e3829a). See
util/mb/Unicode/shift_jis_2004_to_utf8_combined.map for more details.

So the worst case is now 6, rather than 3.

Can we add a column to pg_conversion which represents the "growth
rate"? This would reduce the rate for most encodings much smaller than
6.
--
Tatsuo Ishii
SRA OSS, Inc. Japan