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> I’m further confused by the purpose of `to_text()` and `from_text()`. Their example shows a string composed of mostly Latin characters being encoded into a st

> I’m further confused by the purpose of `to_text()` and `from_text()`. Their example shows a string composed of mostly Latin characters being encoded into a string of emoji and back. This is meant to be used if you want to pass some text containing escape characters or perhaps JSON. Note also that the first emoji is a checksum, which might be useful if you want to make sure a user correctly copy/pasted a string, as opposed to sending a raw text string (without checksum).

Ancapistani 6y ago
> This is meant to be used if you want to pass some text containing escape characters or perhaps JSON. I guess I don’t understand how this is an improvement. Perhaps it’s because I typically interact with the DB through a language-specific library/protocol like Python’s DB API, which handles escaping strings and parameterization without my really having to think about it. Could you provide a specific example of when this might solve a real-world problem?
- JoelJacobson 6y ago
  One intended use-case for the from_text()/to_text() functions is when information is manually copied from some place and pasted somewhere else, where you are worried the user might make a mistake and select the wrong piece of text. For instance, if you instruct the user to copy "this text string" and paste it somewhere, some users might copy the text string with the double-quotes and some without them. By instead emoji encode the string, the receiver of the copied emoji string can detect if not all emojis were copied.
  - Ancapistani 6y ago
    This strikes me as data validation, which should reside in the application layer - I don't see how pg-emoji helps in any way. Further... if the receiver can validate the encoded string itself, they implicitly already have the string. Why require the user to copy/paste at all? If you meant "Ensure that the user hasn't copied quotation marks as well", then we're back to it being application logic. If I'm understanding correctly that the primary benefit is that there is a checksum, then there are already many solutions for this in common use - base58checksum, as used to ensure the validity of Bitcoin addresses, comes immediately to mind. I wrote an implementation of that quite a while ago: https://github.com/lyndsysimon/cryptocoin/blob/primary/cryptocoin/base58.py https://github.com/lyndsysimon/cryptocoin/blob/primary/crypt... Please don't misunderstand, I'm in no way intending to be argumentative. I don't understand the practical use of this project, which leads me to believe that there is a problem being solved that I lack the context to identify.
    - JoelJacobson 6y ago
      In my case, PostgreSQL is the application layer, the application is written in database functions, and I’m using PostgREST to expose it to my front-end.
      - Ancapistani 6y ago
        Ah, that makes more sense then.

Ancapistani 6y ago

> This is meant to be used if you want to pass some text containing escape characters or perhaps JSON. I guess I don’t understand how this is an improvement. Perhaps it’s because I typically interact with the DB through a language-specific library/protocol like Python’s DB API, which handles escaping strings and parameterization without my really having to think about it. Could you provide a specific example of when this might solve a real-world problem?

JoelJacobson 6y ago
One intended use-case for the from_text()/to_text() functions is when information is manually copied from some place and pasted somewhere else, where you are worried the user might make a mistake and select the wrong piece of text. For instance, if you instruct the user to copy "this text string" and paste it somewhere, some users might copy the text string with the double-quotes and some without them. By instead emoji encode the string, the receiver of the copied emoji string can detect if not all emojis were copied.
- Ancapistani 6y ago
  This strikes me as data validation, which should reside in the application layer - I don't see how pg-emoji helps in any way. Further... if the receiver can validate the encoded string itself, they implicitly already have the string. Why require the user to copy/paste at all? If you meant "Ensure that the user hasn't copied quotation marks as well", then we're back to it being application logic. If I'm understanding correctly that the primary benefit is that there is a checksum, then there are already many solutions for this in common use - base58checksum, as used to ensure the validity of Bitcoin addresses, comes immediately to mind. I wrote an implementation of that quite a while ago: https://github.com/lyndsysimon/cryptocoin/blob/primary/cryptocoin/base58.py https://github.com/lyndsysimon/cryptocoin/blob/primary/crypt... Please don't misunderstand, I'm in no way intending to be argumentative. I don't understand the practical use of this project, which leads me to believe that there is a problem being solved that I lack the context to identify.
  - JoelJacobson 6y ago
    In my case, PostgreSQL is the application layer, the application is written in database functions, and I’m using PostgREST to expose it to my front-end.
    - Ancapistani 6y ago
      Ah, that makes more sense then.