Re: JSON for PG 9.2

Hamlin, Garick L <ghamlin@isc.upenn.edu>

From: Garick Hamlin <ghamlin@isc.upenn.edu>

To: "David E. Wheeler" <david@kineticode.com>

Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com>, Joey Adams <joeyadams3.14159@gmail.com>, Claes Jakobsson <claes@surfar.nu>, Dimitri Fontaine <dimitri@2ndquadrant.fr>, Merlin Moncure <mmoncure@gmail.com>, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>, Jan Urbański <wulczer@wulczer.org>, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>, PostgreSQL-development Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Jan Wieck <janwieck@yahoo.com>

Date: 2012-01-20T17:32:45Z

Lists: pgsql-hackers

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 09:12:13AM -0800, David E. Wheeler wrote:
> On Jan 19, 2012, at 9:07 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> 
> > If his client encoding is UTF8, the value will be letter-perfect JSON
> > when it gets to him; and if his client encoding is not UTF8, then he's
> > already pretty much decided that he doesn't give a fig about the
> > Unicode-centricity of the JSON spec, no?
> 
> Don’t entirely agree with this. Some folks are stuck with other encodings and
> cannot change them for one reason or another. That said, they can convert
> JSON from their required encoding into UTF-8 on the client side, so there is
> a workaround.

Perhaps in addition to trying to just 'do the right thing by default',
it makes sense to have a two canonicalization functions?

Say: json_utf8() and json_ascii().

They could give the same output no matter what encoding was set? 

json_utf8 would give nice output where characters were canonicalized to 
native utf8 characters and json_ascii() would output only non-control
ascii characters literally and escape everything else or something
like that?

Garick