Field types (was Re: Return value of int)

"D'Arcy" "J.M." Cain <darcy(at)druid(dot)net> writes:
> Regarding this, it would be nice if libpq had some official, documented
> way of determining the type of the field. Currently I deal with this
> in PyGreSQL by stealing some #defines from src/include/catalog/pg_type.h,
> something that isn't normally available to application programmers.

Well, I don't see a big problem with stealing the defines --- the odds
of the OID for INT4, say, ever changing are pretty low.

But of course the "official, documented" way to find out what a given
type OID means is

SELECT typname FROM pg_type WHERE oid = <whatever>;

If you kept a cache of type info on the application side, you could
probably even make this fast enough to be a reasonable approach :-)

regards, tom lane