Re: JSON for PG 9.2

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 1:52 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 4:47 PM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
>>> Make JSON datatypes only selectable if client encoding is UTF-8.
>>
>> Yuck. Do we have this sort of restriction for any other data type?
>
> No, and I don't think it's necessary to do it here, either.  Nor would
> it be a good idea, because then the return value of EXPLAIN (FORMAT
> JSON) couldn't unconditionally be json.  But I think the important
> point is that this is an obscure corner case.  Let me say that one
> more time: obscure corner case!
>
> The only reason JSON needs to care about this at all is that it allows
> \u1234 to mean Unicode code point 0x1234.  But for that detail, JSON
> would be encoding-agnostic.  So I think it's sufficient for us to
> simply decide that that particular feature may not work (or even, will
> not work) for non-ASCII characters if you use a non-UTF8 encoding.
> There's still plenty of useful things that can be done with JSON even
> if that particular feature is not available; and that way we don't
> have to completely disable the data type just because someone wants to
> use EUC-JP or something.

Completely agree. I was going to write almost exactly this in reply.

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