The attached docs patch makes clearer how arguments and return values in pl/perl are escaped. This is to clarify the situation that Theo Schlossnagle recently reported on -bugs.
If there's no objection I will apply this. cheers andrew
? plperldoc.patch Index: plperl.sgml =================================================================== RCS file: /cvsroot/pgsql/doc/src/sgml/plperl.sgml,v retrieving revision 2.65 diff -c -r2.65 plperl.sgml *** plperl.sgml 3 May 2007 15:05:56 -0000 2.65 --- plperl.sgml 3 May 2007 22:19:05 -0000 *************** *** 138,143 **** --- 138,169 ---- </para> <para> + Anything in a function argument or result that is not a reference is + a string, which is in the standard <productname>PostgreSQL</productname> + external text representation for the relevant data type. In the case of + ordinary numeric or text types, Perl will just do the right thing and + the programmer will normally not have to worry about it. However, in + other cases the argument will need to be converted into a form that is + more usable in Perl, and the return result will need to be converted to + the form that <productname>PostgreSQL</productname> expects. For example, + here is how to convert an argument of type bytea into unescaped binary + data: + + <programlisting> + my $arg = shift; + $arg =~ s!\\(\d{3})!chr(oct($1))!ge; + </programlisting> + + and here is how to escape binary data for a return value of type bytea: + + <programlisting> + $retval =~ s!([^ -~])!sprintf("\\%03o",ord($1))!ge; + return $retval; + </programlisting> + + </para> + + <para> Perl can return <productname>PostgreSQL</productname> arrays as references to Perl arrays. Here is an example:
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