Re: Suggesting a libpq addition

>
> That would be a *HUGE* piece of software compared the relatively small
> thing I am suggesting...
>

Sometimes complex and large solutions are required for the simplest of 
ideas.  I believe this is one of those cases.  You can't solve the 
"printf style PQexec" properly by merely implementing a sprintf wrapper.

> As for escaping (or not escaping) of string arguments, that can be seen
> as a bug or a feature.  I do not wan't automatic escaping of string
> arguments in all cases, e.g. I might to construct an SQL statement with
> dynamic parts "WHERE xy" or "AND a = b".
>
> hypothetical example:
>
> filter = "WHERE name like 'Balmer%'";
> if (sort == SORT_DESC)
>     sort = " ORDER BY name DESCENDING";
>
> PQvexec(conn, "SELECT name, nr, id FROM address %s%s", filter, sort);
>
> So what I am aiming at right now is a PQvexec() function that basically
> has printf() like semantics, but adds an additional token to the format
> string (printf uses %s and %b to produce strings.) I am thinking of
> adding %S and %B, which produce strings that are escaped.
>

This suffers from becoming cryptic over time, see Tom Lane's comments 
back in 2007 on this 
(http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-12/msg00362.php). 
libpqtypes uses the human readable %schema.typename (schema is optional) 
to specify format specifiers.  There is no learning curve or ambiguity, 
if you want a point than use "%point", or "%my_type"....  libpqtypes 
allows you to register aliases (PQregisterSubClasses) so that you can 
map %text to %s to make it feel more like C..

-- 
Andrew Chernow
eSilo, LLC
every bit counts
http://www.esilo.com/