Re: Better to dump tabs as tabs, or \t?

Tom Lane wrote:
> Historically pg_dump has taken pains to dump ASCII control characters
> as backslash constructs, for instance \t for tab. I am thinking this
> is not such a great idea, and that it'd be more portable rather than
> less so if we got rid of that logic and just dumped tab as tab, etc.
> In particular, making this play nice with standard_conforming_strings
> seems unpleasant: we'll have to emit E'' strings which are certainly
> not portable, not even to older PG releases.
>
> The only good argument I can see for the current behavior is that it
> makes the dump file somewhat more robust against whitespace-mashing
> filters like typical email programs. But I wouldn't count on a
> dump file to come through such a thing completely unscathed anyway.
>
>
>

Go for it.

Emailing a database dump as other than a properly encoded MIME
attachment makes no sense these days.

cheers

andrew