Peter Eisentraut wrote: > The central problem I have is this: How do we deal with the fact that > an XML datum carries its own encoding information?
Maybe I am misunderstanding your question, but IMO postgres should be treating xml documents as if they were binary data, unless the server takes on the role of a parser, in which case it should handle unspecified/unknown encodings just like a normal xml parser would (and this does *not* include changing the encoding!). According to me, an XML parser should not change one bit of a document, because that is not a 'parse', but a 'transformation'. > Rewriting the <?xml?> declaration seems like a workable solution, but it > would break the transparency of the client/server encoding conversion. > Also, some people might dislike that their documents are being changed > as they are stored. Right, your example begs the question: why does the server care what the encoding of the documents is (perhaps indexing)? ZML validation is a standardized operation which the server (or psql, I suppose) can subcontract out to another application. Just a side thought: what if the xml encoding type was built into the domain type itself? create domain xml_utf8 ... Which allows casting, etc. which is more natural than an implicit transformation. Regards, Merlin ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
