Tom Lane 05d249717d Improve similar_escape() in two different ways:
* Stop escaping ? and {.  As of SQL:2008, SIMILAR TO is defined to have
POSIX-compatible interpretation of ? as well as {m,n} and related constructs,
so we should allow these things through to our regex engine.

* Escape ^ and $.  It appears that our regex engine will treat ^^ at the
beginning of the string the same as ^, and similarly for $$ at the end of
the string, which meant that SIMILAR TO was effectively ignoring ^ at the
start of the pattern and $ at the end.  Since these are not supposed to be
metacharacters, this is a bug.

The second part of this is arguably a back-patchable bug fix, but I'm
hesitant to do that because it might break applications that are expecting
something like "col SIMILAR TO '^foo$'" to work like a POSIX pattern.
Seems safer to only change it at a major version boundary.

Per discussion of an example from Doug Gorley.
2009-10-10 03:50:15 +00:00
..