character confusion

[Steve Crawford <scrawford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just noticed something odd with a column of type "char". According to 
the docs (and the way my old PG ran), the character data-type is 
blank-padded. I'm not seeing that on one of my current machines (8.3.8) 
or, perhaps I'm going blind on Friday. Was the definition of char changed?

Here is what I am seeing:

steve=> create temporary table foo (bar char(10));
CREATE TABLE
steve=> \d foo
      Table "pg_temp_2.foo"
Column |     Type      | Modifiers
--------+---------------+-----------
bar    | character(10) |

steve=> insert into foo values ('');
INSERT 0 1

steve=> insert into foo values ('asd');
INSERT 0 1

steve=> insert into foo values ('asdfasdf');
INSERT 0 1

steve=> insert into foo values ('asdfasdfas');
INSERT 0 1

steve=> insert into foo values ('asdfasdfasd');
ERROR:  value too long for type character(10)

steve=>=> select bar,length(bar),char_length(bar) from foo;
   bar     | length | char_length
------------+--------+-------------
           |      0 |           0
asd        |      3 |           3
asdfasdf   |      8 |           8
asdfasdfas |     10 |          10
select bar,length(bar) from foo;


Cheers,
Steve


--
Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general