On Wednesday, March 5, 2025, Shay Rojansky <r...@roji.org> wrote: > >>> SELECT JSON_VALUE(jsonb '"AQID"', '$' RETURNING bytea); -- Expected >>> 0x010203, got AQID >>> >> >> I get \x41514944 which is precisely what I would expect since it what >> this query results in as well: >> >> select 'AQID'::bytea; >> > > If the behavior of RETURNING is meant to be identical to that of simply > applying a cast, is there any actual advantage in using JSON_VALUE with > RETURNING? In other words, why not just do JSON_VALUE(json '"AQID"', > '$')::bytea instead of using RETURNING? I thought the point was precisely > for RETURNING to be able to perform JSON-specific conversions (e.g. take > into account that the base64 is being converted from a *JSON* string, and > therefore apply base64 decoding to it). >
Not really…it does seem to just be syntactic sugar. Not that we’d be likely to assume the contents of a JSON string are a base64 encoding as it is just, as you claim, a de-facto standard. Unless we have some standard (namely the one defining json_value) telling us that the contents are indeed always base64 encoded data we’ll just assume it’s plain text and act accordingly - in this case passing it into bytea’s input function. David J.
