Re: string function - "format" function proposal

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 12:55 AM, Itagaki Takahiro
<itagaki(dot)takahiro(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 12:59 PM, Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> then maybe %ls or %is - like "literal string" or "ident string".
>
> Yeah, good idea!

-1 from me. What does this do except make it more long-winded?

>> I don't think so merging sprintf and format can be good. Sprintf is
>> too complex - so long years users don't know specification well and
>> creating some like sprintf function can be messy for users. I like to
>> see accurate sprintf function in contrib - and some else in core.
>
> I agree that full-spec sprintf is too complex, but precision and
> zero-full for numeric types are commonly used. I think someone
> will ask us "Why don't have numeric formats though we have %s?".

I think someone might also ask - why are you bothering to create this
at all? The amount of work that has been put into this is, IMHO, far
out of proportion to the value of the feature. As Pavel points out,
we already have perfectly good mechanisms for converting our various
data types to text. We do not need to invent new ones.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company