Re: Am I entering a world of pain... - Mailing list pgsql-novice

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Aled Morris wrote:

> ...by trying to port a SQL Server application to Postgresql?
>
> I am unable to get a simple function to work.  Any ideas as to what is wrong
> with it?
>
> create or replace function droptable (varchar(255)) returns void as '
> begin
>   drop table $1;
>   return;
> end;
> ' language 'plpgsql';
>
> This is what happens when I execute the function:
>
> select droptable('asdfadsfasfd');
> WARNING:  Error occurred while executing PL/pgSQL function droptable
> WARNING:  line 2 at SQL statement
> ERROR:  parser: parse error at or near "$1" at character 13

We don't support using variables directly for object names like that,
you'd have to do something like
 EXECUTE ''drop table '' || $1;