On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Miko O'Sullivan wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jon Jensen) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
INSERT INTO sometable (5, <<\.
a
very long
string
\.
);
I'm delighted to hear that here docs are being discussed for postgres. In the world of Perl here docs make life SO MUCH easier by allowing for independent quoting scopes. Jon, I'm totally in agreement with you that here docs would be a valuable addition to postgres. I'd like to propose a few modifications on the syntax you suggest above.
In Perl, the rule for here docs is NOT "it starts immediately after the definition of the terminator" (as in your example). The rule is "it starts on the first line after the end of the command in which the terminator appears". There's a very good reason for this distinction. That reason is that it allows the command to be succinct, usually a single line, and the here doc stays completely separate. So, your example would like this instead:
INSERT INTO sometable (5, <<'(END)'); a very long string (END)
Notice that the entire INSERT command is on one line. Very easy to read.
Well we might also have something like CREATE FUNCTION ... AS QUOTE('MyEndMarker') .... all the stuff ... MyEndMarker LANGUAGE 'plpgsql';
This looks quite SQL-like and should be easily implementable. Anyway, this Perl-like style or Tom's proof-of-concept dollar-quoting one, both seem equally usable, now let's have someone roll a die to decide.
Regards, Andreas
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