Tom Lane wrote:
I don't really see the problem. I assume from your reference to pg_trgm that you're using trigram similarity as the prefilter for potential matches
It turns out that's no good anyway, as it appears to ignore characters outside the ASCII range. Rather less than useful for searching a database of translated strings ;-)
so a slow final LIKE match shouldn't be an issue really. (And besides, speed doesn't seem like the be-all and end-all here.)
True. It's not so much the speed as the fragility when faced with small changes to formatting. In addition to whitespace, some clients mangle punctuation with features like automatic "curly"-quoting.
AFAICS you just need to translate %-string format escapes to %, quote any other % or _, and away you go. One thing that might be worth doing is avoiding spacing sensitivity, since whitespace is frequently mangled in copy-and-paste. Perhaps strip all spaces from both strings before matching?
Yep, that sounds pretty reasonable. As usual I'm making things more complicated than they need to be. I suspect it'll be necessary to strip quotes and some other punctuation too, but that's not a big deal.
-- Craig Ringer
