Re: Invalid YAML output from EXPLAIN

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 10:47 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 4:14 AM, Dean Rasheed <dean(dot)a(dot)rasheed(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> Testing 9.0 beta, I found that EXPLAINing certain queries in YAML
>> format will produce invalid YAML, for example:
>>
>> explain (format yaml) select * from foo where str_val = 'a: b';
>>
>> The problem in this case is that a colon followed by whitespace is not
>> allowed in an unquoted plain YAML string because a parser would
>> interpret it as the start of a map.
>>
>> So the current code in escape_yaml() is inadequate for producing valid
>> YAML. I think it would have to also consider at least the following
>> characters as special "-"  ":"  "["  "]"  "{"  "}"  ","  "\""  "'"
>> "|"  "*"  "&". Technically, it would also need to trap empty strings,
>> and strings with leading or trailing whitespace.
>>
>> Making escape_yaml() completely bulletproof with this approach would
>> be quite difficult, and (IMO) not worth the effort, especially given
>> that an important requirement is that the output be machine readable,
>> and in my experience YAML parsers are often far from perfect.
>>
>> I would therefore argue for simply calling escape_json() to produce
>> double quoted output for all string values, and only have numeric
>> values unquoted. This is not really any less human readable, and is
>> far more machine readable.
>>
>> Patch attached.
>
> I've committed a patch which I think will address this issue without
> uglifying the output quite so much.  Also, I didn't like the idea of
> not applying escaping to both the keys and values, even though we
> think we'll never have a key that requires escaping.  With this
> approach, that change isn't needed.

Er, I should also say, thanks for the report, and please test. I am
definitely not an expert on YAML.

--
Robert Haas
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