Re: bytea datatype documentation patch

Joe Conway writes:

> Here's a second bytea documentation patch. This one significantly
> expands the "Binary Data" section added by Bruce recently.

This is good material, just a couple of comments.

I feel that basing the whole discussion on what "ASCII" characters can be
stored, are nonprintable, must be escaped, etc. is not appropriate.
Bytea doesn't store characters, it stores bytes (or octets, as you wish).
The correspondence between bytes and characters is old-fashioned and
pretty much does not exist in SQL except for a few places such as
OCTET_LENGTH.

Conversely, the discussion about whether text should be able to cope with
zero bytes is nonsensical because text stores characters and not bytes.

So I would base this discussion on the premise "bytea stores binary data"
(insert examples).

Some stylistic issues:

bytea => <type>bytea</type>

NULLs => zero bytes/bytes of value zero ("NULL" is too overloaded)

'non-printable' => <quote>nonprintable</quote>

MUST => <emphasis>must</emphasis>

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net