> So I would base this discussion on the premise "bytea stores binary data"
> (insert examples).
>
> Some stylistic issues:
>
> bytea => <type>bytea</type>
>
> NULLs => zero bytes/bytes of value zero ("NULL" is too overloaded)
>
> 'non-printable' => <quote>nonprintable</quote>
>
> MUST => <emphasis>must</emphasis>
>
Here's a patch against *CVS tip* to address Peter's comments. Please let
me know what you think!
Joe Conway
libpq.sgml
I was trying (but gave up) to cross-reference back to the input escape
table in the User's Guide, but could not get the documentation to
compile with a cross-book xref (missing IDREF error). Can a cross-book
xref be done?
Joe Conway
Operators", plagiarized shamelessly from the "String Functions and
Operators" section. There were enough differences that it made sense (at
least to me) to give this its own section instead of cramming it in with
normal string functions. This way I could also make the examples
relevant, which is particularly important for bytea.
One thing I think worth mentioning: while documenting the trim()
function I realized that I never implemented the bytea equivalent of
rtrim and ltrim. Therefore, the 'leading' and 'trailing' forms of trim,
available with text, are not available with bytea (I'd be happy to
correct this, but since it would require an initdb, I guess not until
7.3) -- the submitted doc accurately reflects this.
I will look for other areas of the docs that need mention of bytea, but
any guidance would be much appreciated.
--
Here's a second bytea documentation patch. This one significantly
expands the "Binary Data" section added by Bruce recently.
Joe Conway
Admin Guide. Move discussion of template databases out of footnotes
in CREATE DATABASE ref page and into a section of the Admin Guide.
Clean up various obsolete claims, do some copy-editing.
bpchar, bit, numeric with typmod -1. Alter format_type so that this
representation is printed when the typmod is -1. This ensures that
tables having such columns can be pg_dump'd and reloaded correctly.
Also, remove the rather useless and non-SQL-compliant default
precision and scale for type NUMERIC. A numeric column declared as
such (with no precision/scale) will now have typmod -1 which means
that numeric values of any precision/scale can be stored in it,
without conversion to a uniform scale. This seems significantly
more useful than the former behavior. Part of response to bug #513.
