Horton

Doc patch on psql output formats

Daniel Verite <daniel@manitou-mail.org>

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From: "Daniel Verite" <daniel@manitou-mail.org>
To: pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2018-11-06T14:46:32Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

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  Hi,

psql's documentation has this mention about output formats:
 "Unique abbreviations are allowed. (That would mean one letter is enough.)"

but "one letter is enough" is not true since 9.3 that added
"latex-longtable" sharing the same start as "latex", and then 
9.5 added "asciidoc" with the same first letter as "aligned".

When a non-unique abbreviation is used, psql uses the first
match in an arbitrary order defined in do_pset() by
a cascade of pg_strncasecmp().
(the recent commit add9182e reorders them alphabetically
but it turns out that it doesn't change the relative positions
of  "aligned" / "asciidoc", or "latex" / "latex-longtables"
so \pset format a and \pset format l will continue to
select "aligned" and "latex" as before).

Anyway, "Unique abbreviations are allowed" deserves to
be changed as well.

PFA a doc patch to say simply "Abbreviations are allowed".


Best regards,
-- 
Daniel Vérité
PostgreSQL-powered mailer: http://www.manitou-mail.org
Twitter: @DanielVerite

Commits

  1. Fix breakage of "\pset format latex".

  2. Make psql's "\pset format" command reject non-unique abbreviations.

  3. Doc: remove claim that all \pset format options are unique in 1 letter.

  4. Reorganize format options of psql in alphabetical order