Re: Bug in ILIKE?

Tom Lane wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
>   
>> The docs actually don't state what are the semantics of escape followed 
>> by something that is not escape or a metachar. Does the spec say 
>> anything about that?
>>     
>
> The spec says it's an error, per the SQL92 excerpt I quoted in the
> previous thread.  (SQL99 says about the same with more notation;
> I didn't bother looking in the later specs.)
>
> I find that position too restrictive, mainly because of this
> consideration: suppose some future version of the spec invents
> additional metacharacters.  To be concrete, suppose ? means
> something special in SQL2010.  Now how do you make a pattern that
> works in both older and newer servers?  \? means literal ? to the
> newer server, but if it throws an error on the older, you're stuck.
>
> So I'm for the definition that escape-anything means exactly anything,
> without any special treatment that it would otherwise have.  And in
> the case of ILIKE it seems like "no special treatment" should mean
> "case insensitive match".
>   

Well, it looks to me to be pretty easily fixable. Given the above it 
seems to me marginal to call it a bug, though. I don't have very strong 
feelings, but I am generally opposed to changing the visible behaviour 
in stable releases unless something is clearly a bug.

cheers

andrew
>             regards, tom lane
>
>