Re: Unicode string literals versus the world

On 4/11/09, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> It gets worse though: I have seldom seen such a badly designed piece of
> syntax as the Unicode string syntax --- see
> http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/sql-syntax-lexical.html#SQL-SYNTAX-STRINGS-UESCAPE
>
> You scan the string, and then after that they tell you what the escape
> character is!? Not to mention the obvious ambiguity with & as an
> operator.
>
> If we let this go into 8.4, our previous rounds with security holes
> caused by careless string parsing will look like a day at the beach.
> No frontend that isn't fully cognizant of the Unicode string syntax is
> going to parse such things correctly --- it's going to be trivial for
> a bad guy to confuse a quoting mechanism as to what's an escape and what
> isn't.
>
> I think we need to give very serious consideration to ripping out that
> "feature".

Ugh, it's rather dubious indeed. Especially when we are already in
the middle of seriously confusing conversion from stdstr=off -> on.
Is it really OK to introduce even more complexity in the mix?

Alternative proposal - maybe it would be saner to introduce \uXXXX
escape to E'' strings as a non-standard way for quoting unicode.

Later when the standard quoting is our only quoting method we can play
with standard extensions?

--
marko