Re: proposal - urlencode, urldecode support

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 02:41:19PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > 2012/4/25 Michael Glaesemann <grzm(at)seespotcode(dot)net>:
> >> Sounds like a great idea for a PGXN module.
>
> > it is one variant - but with support some web technologies - XML,
> > JSON, I prefer this in core. Urlcode is one the most used code on
> > world now - implementation is simple - and it can be well integrated
> > with decode, encode functions.
>
> Embedding that in encode/decode sounds to me like a pretty horrid idea,
> actually, unless I misunderstand what you are talking about. URL
> encoding is a text-to-text transformation, no? If so, it doesn't fit
> into encode/decode, which presume a binary (bytea) decoded form. People
> would be needing to do entirely bogus text/bytea coercions to use
> such an implementation.

I don't understand the actual proposal here, but urlencoding encodes
octets as quoted us-ascii. So, its not really text to text, but
bytes to US-ASCII and US-ASCII to bytes. AIUI, a unicode character
has no well specified urlencoding. A utf-8 encoded unicode character can
be said to have an urlencoding since we can come up a stream of octets
to urlencode.

Garick