I'm experiencing much trouble making use of the V1 custom c function definition framework built into postgres, probably by virtue of my lack of experience with C.
In a nutshell, I've paid close attention to the documentation, have had some success getting useful code out of the version 0 naming convention for simple return types, but need to do some variable-length text processing (to write a crc hash function). My basic question is how to usefully get through the header architecture into some actual data so that I can do an some calculations and return a useful result. The simplest possible example I could come up with was a slight modification one of the documentation's "variable length, by reference" examples: PG_FUNCTION_INFO_V1(par); Datum par(PG_FUNCTION_ARGS) // pete and repeat! takes text struct pointer { text *t = PG_GETARG_TEXT_P(0); text *new_t = (text*) palloc(VARSIZE(t)); VARATT_SIZEP(new_t) = VARSIZE(t); memcpy((void*) VARDATA(new_t),(void*)VARDATA(t),VARSIZE(t) - VARHDRSZ); char *ptr = (char*) VARDATA(new_t); *ptr = 'Q'; // NO EFFECT PG_RETURN_TEXT(new_t); } The "no effect" comment applies to trying to rewrite to the same memory, write from some static type I define, etc, etc. I'm guessing there's a const declaration hiding somewhere that I'm missing. I'd really love to look at some documentation for what a text struct actually IS so that I can use an indirection operator to get its internals. But I'm guessing that's not the appropriate way to do it... -- ======================================================== Jason Nerothin Programmer/Analyst IV - Database Administration UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics & Proteomics Howard Hughes Medical Institute ======================================================== 611 C.E. Young Drive East | Tel: (310) 206-3907 105 Boyer Hall, Box 951570 | Fax: (310) 206-3914 Los Angeles, CA 90095. USA | Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ======================================================== http://www.mbi.ucla.edu/~jason ========================================================