Re: Add jsonb_compact(...) for whitespace-free jsonb to text

On 26 April 2016 at 12:49, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:

* Ryan Pedela (rpedela@datalanche.com) wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 4:02 PM, Sehrope Sarkuni <sehrope@jackdb.com> wrote:
> > The default text representation of jsonb adds whitespace in between
> > key/value pairs (after the colon ":") and after successive properties
> > (after the comma ","):

[...]

> > It'd be nice to have a stable text representation of a jsonb value with
> > minimal whitespace. The latter would also save a few bytes per record in
> > text output formats, on the wire, and in backups (ex: COPY ... TO STDOUT).
>
> +1
>
> I cannot comment on the patch itself, but I welcome jsonb_compact() or some
> way to get JSON with no inserted whitespace.

As I mentioned to Sehrope on IRC, at least for my 2c, if you want a
compact JSON format to reduce the amount of traffic over the wire or to
do things with on the client side, we should probably come up with a
binary format, rather than just hack out the whitespace.  It's not like
representing numbers using ASCII characters is terribly efficient
either.