seg: Fix seg_out() to preserve the upper boundary's certainty indicator

Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@iki.fi>

Commit: 0e1f1ed157e90741e12a3715909e1b2d71ff9344
Author: Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@iki.fi>
Date: 2026-06-11T09:33:48Z
seg: Fix seg_out() to preserve the upper boundary's certainty indicator

When printing the upper boundary of a seg interval, seg_out() decided
whether to emit the certainty indicator ('<', '>' or '~') by testing the
upper indicator (u_ext) for '<' and '>', but mistakenly tested the lower
indicator (l_ext) for '~'.  This is a copy-and-paste slip from the
symmetric code that prints the lower boundary a few lines above.

The consequences for valid input were:

  * A '~' on the upper boundary was dropped on output, e.g.
    '1.5 .. ~2.5'::seg printed as '1.5 .. 2.5'.

  * When the lower boundary carried '~' but the upper boundary had no
    indicator, the wrong test matched and sprintf(p, "%c", seg->u_ext)
    wrote a NUL byte (u_ext == '\0'), which truncated the result string
    and silently lost the entire upper boundary, e.g.
    '~6.5 .. 8.5'::seg printed as '~6.5 .. '.

Certainty indicators are documented to be preserved on output (they are
ignored by the operators, but kept as comments), so this broke the
input/output round-trip for the affected values.

The bug has existed since seg was added.  It went unnoticed because the
existing regression tests only exercised certainty indicators on
single-point segs, which are printed by a different branch of seg_out().
Add tests that place indicators on both boundaries of an interval.

Author: Ewan Young <kdbase.hack@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAON2xHPYeRRCEVAv8XfE18KsEsEHCiYcJ5fOsoxFuMEfpxF1=g@mail.gmail.com
Backpatch-through: 14

Files

PathChange+/−
contrib/seg/expected/seg.out modified +44 −1
contrib/seg/seg.c modified +1 −1
contrib/seg/sql/seg.sql modified +10 −1

Discussion