Andrew Dunstan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I ended up not using a regex, which seemed to be a little heavy handed, > but just writing a small custom recognition function, that should (and I > think does) mimic the pattern recognition for these tokens used by the > backend lexer.
I looked at this and realized that it still doesn't do very well at distinguishing $foo$ from other random uses of $. The problem is that looking back at just the immediately preceding character isn't enough context to tell whether a $ is part of an identifier. Consider the input a42$foo$ This is a legal identifier according to PG 7.4. But how about 42$foo$ This is a syntax error in 7.4, and we propose to redefine it as an integer literal '42' followed by a dollar-quote start symbol. There's no way to tell these apart with a single-character lookback, or indeed any fixed number of characters of lookback. I begin to think that we'll really have to bite the bullet and convert psql's input parser to use flex. If we're not scanning with exactly the same rules as the backend uses, we're going to get the wrong answers. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster