3 ms·

There are two kinds of programmers: Those who think of strings as text, and those who think of strings as a sequence of bytes. The second group doesn’t care abo

• mattashii 2y ago
  In that second case the string is better represented as "bytea", which has most (but not all) of the features of the "text" type.
  • pdimitar 2y ago
    I agree with your take, it's just that many programmers want to easily jump from "byte array" to "string in XYZ encoding". I personally prefer byte arrays for unsafe data and to do deserialization in application code.
    • rlupi 2y ago
      In other words, considering we are talking about string and unicode... There are two types of programmers, those that are wrong and those that are very wrong
      • pdimitar 2y ago
        lol. :) Funny but not entirely true. I had cases when we had to urgently store a firehose of data and figure out the right string encoding later. Just dumping the strings with uncertain encoding in `bytea` columns helped us there. Plus for some fields it helps with auditability f.ex. when you get raw binary-encoded telemetry from devices in the field, you should store their raw payloads _and_ the parsed data structures that you got from them. Being this paranoid has saved my neck a few times. The secret is to accept you are not without fault and take measures to be able to correct yourself in the future.
        • emmelaich 2y ago
          Indeed, one system I dealt with used char instead of blob. The text as stored was riddled with U+FFFE (unicode unknown character).