Andres Freund <andres@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> On 2014-02-04 11:36:22 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> -1. This is not a general solution to the problem. There are other
>> GUCs for which people might want spaces in the value.
> Sure, I didn't say it was. But I don't see any oother values that are
> likely being passed via PGOPTIONS that frequently contain spaces.
application_name --- weren't we just reading about people passing entire
command lines there? (They must be using some other way of setting it
currently, but PGOPTIONS doesn't seem like an implausible source.)
>> Yeah. See pg_split_opts(), which explicitly acknowledges that it'll fall
>> down for space-containing options. Not sure what the most appropriate
>> quoting convention would be there, but I'm sure we can think of something.
> No argument against introducing it. What about simply allowing escaping
> of the next character using \?
The same thought had occurred to me. Since it'll typically already be
inside some levels of quoting, any quoted-string convention seems like
it'd be a pain to use. But a straight backslash-escapes-the-next-char
thing wouldn't be too awful, I think.
regards, tom lane