On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 11:54:51 -0400, Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The problem with regex is that to be upward-compatible with the old > exact-match switch definitions, a switch value that doesn't contain > any regex special characters is treated as an equality condition not > a pattern, which makes for a discontinuity. For instance, "-t x" is > treated like -t '^x$' while -t 'x.*y' doesn't get the anchors added. > That's going to burn people. An alternative we could consider is to > use LIKE patterns instead, but since underscore is a wildcard in LIKE, > it's easy to imagine people getting burnt by that too. Or we could > import the rather ad-hoc shell-wildcard-like rules used by psql's \d > stuff. None of these are especially attractive :-( > > Comments?
How about making the regex's anchored by default? People who want unanchored ones can add .* at the beginning and/or end. Since only whether or not the pattern matches is important (not the string it matched), this keeps all of the same power, but matches the old behavior in simple cases. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org