Re: Unicode grapheme clusters

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 07:53:43PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
> > I am not sure what you are referring to above? character_length? I was
> > talking about display length, and psql uses that --- at some point, our
> > lack of support for graphemes will cause psql to not align columns.
>
> That's going to happen regardless, as long as we can't be sure
> what the display will do with the characters --- and that's a
> problem that will persist for a very long time.
>
> Ideally, yeah, it'd be great if all this stuff rendered perfectly;
> but IMO it's so far outside mainstream usage of psql that it's
> not something that could possibly repay the investment of time
> to get even a partial solution.

We have a few options:

* TODO item
* document psql works that way
* do nothing

I think the big question is how common such cases will be in the future.
The report from 2022, and one from 2019 didn't seem to clearly outline
the issue so it would good to have something documented somewhere.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

Embrace your flaws. They make you human, rather than perfect,
which you will never be.