"David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com> writes: > On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 4:09 AM, <vodevsh@gmail.com> wrote: >> I'm not sure if it's a bug or feature, but I find error message misleading. >> ERROR: relation [“schema_name.table_name”] does not exist gives an >> impression that schema name is part of relation name. Should not it be >> ERROR: relation [“schema name”].["table_name"] does not exist instead? I >> doubt it's a bug, because this message seems version not specific. But does >> not it look wrong?
> More to the point, the double quotes are not part of the identifiers but > rather offset the item being named from the rest of the sentence fragment.
Yes. In a translated message you might see something like
Relation »schema_name.table_name« existiert nicht
That is, the double quotes here are not SQL syntax but part of the human language that the error message is written in. It's unfortunate in this context that SQL's identifier quoting character is the same as we use in English, because it invites confusion like the OP's. But the only way to fix that would be to go over to non-ASCII quoting characters (curly quotes, say) in the English message texts, and that would create tons of practical problems. Plus, if you didn't look closely enough to see the difference between curly quotes and plain double quotes, you'd still be confused.
