Re: New cast between inet/cidr and bytea

Zoltan Boszormenyi wrote:
>> Also: to the extent that the application is willing to deal with a
>> Postgres-specific inet/cidr representation (which, in the end, is
>> what this would be) it can do that *today* using binary output format.
>> So I'm still not seeing an argument for exposing a cast to bytea.
>>
>>             regards, tom lane
>>   
>
> But the binary output of inet/cidr needs another round of parsing
> which requires using internal server headers.
>
> Would you like a 4/8/16/32 byte output using IP only
> or IP + fully represented netmask better?
>
>

How are you getting the bytea output? If as text then you're going to be 
doing parsing anyway; if as binary, why not just get the binary of the 
base type directly? It is not clear to me why we should provide this 
facility just for inet/cidr - if it is justified in that case it should 
be required for all types.

cheers

andrew