> An alternative approach is to make charin and text_char map empty
> strings to the null character (\0), and conversely make charout and
> char_text map the null character to empty strings. charout already
> acts that way, in effect, since it has to produce a null-terminated
> This way would have the advantage that there would still
> be a reversible dump and reload representation for a "char" field
> containing '\0'
I more like this. IIRC some implementations allow storing a \0 in char(n) also.
Then it is 8bit clean and can be used for a 1 byte number. Such values
can usually only be inserted and selected with host variables.
Andreas
