Tom Lane writes: > One thing that's really unclear to me is what's the difference between > a <character translation> and a <form-of-use conversion>, other than > that they didn't provide a syntax for defining new conversions.
The standard has this messed up. In part 1, a form-of-use and an encoding are two distinct things that can be applied to a character repertoire (see clause 4.6.2.1), whereas in part 2 the term encoding is used in the definition of form-of-use (clause 3.1.5 r). When I sort it out, however, I think that what Tatsuo was describing is indeed a form-of-use conversion. Note that in part 2, clause 4.2.2.1, it says about form-of-use conversions, It is intended, though not enforced by this part of ISO/IEC 9075, that S2 be exactly the same sequence of characters as S1, but encoded according some different form-of-use. A typical use might be to convert a character string from two-octet UCS to one-octet Latin1 or vice versa. This seems to match what we're doing. A character translation does not make this requirement and it explicitly calls out the possibility of "many-to-one or one-to-one mapping between two not necessarily distinct character sets". I imagine that what this is intended to do is to allow the user to create mappings such as ö -> oe (as is common in German to avoid using characters with diacritic marks), or ö -> o (as one might do in French to achieve the same). In fact, it's a glorified sed command. So I withdraw my earlier comment. But perhaps the syntax of the proposed command could be aligned with the CREATE TRANSLATION command. -- Peter Eisentraut [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])