Re: Array question

David E. Wheeler wrote:
> On Sep 7, 2009, at 6:29 PM, Alvar Freude wrote:
>
>> I tried to set an "PG_ANYARRAY" or "PG_TEXTARRAY" type manually with 
>> ->bind_col(), but this does not help.
>>
>>
>> Any ideas how I can get an array for this?
>>
>> Or is there a PostgreSQL Array parser? ;-)
>
> I believe that this is a deficiency in DBD::Pg. Another deficiency is 
> in its inability to determine that a user-defined type should be 
> converted to utf8 when pg_enable_utf8 is set, such as for the CITEXT 
> contrib type (discussion here: 
> http://markmail.org/message/mqqz76vdlxibyoyw#query:DBD%3A%3APg%20citext+page:1+mid:mqqz76vdlxibyoyw+state:results). 
>
>
> The issue is that DBD::Pg needs to be smarter about identifying data 
> types and data type categories (citext is of category "S", for string 
> in 8.4 and later). At least, that's my best guess.
>
>

No doubt it's possible to have DBD::Pg learn about user-defined 
composites and arrays of them, although the code for doing so might get 
a bit elaborate, but how would it handle a type defined in C, the 
representation of which it has no way of knowing about at all? I think 
we have to accept that the existence of type extensibility in Postgres 
means that there will be at least some types that DBD::Pg has to treat 
as opaque bits of text.

That's not to say that it shouldn't learn about some types in contrib 
like citext and hstore.

cheers

andrew