Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> Currently we output the ctid as a string:
> snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "(%u,%u)", blockNumber, offsetNumber);
> Perhaps someday we should consider outputting that as an array or a
> result set:
It's not an array, because the two components are not of the same data
type; and it's not a result set, any more than (say) a point or a box
is. What it is is a record datatype.
There might be some usefulness to adding SQL functions to allow
extraction of the block number and item number fields, though we'd have
some problems with the lack of a uint4 datatype to represent the block
number field's type. The demand for this has been too low to make me
feel we need to expend that effort...
regards, tom lane
