maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Sergei Golubchik <serg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Alexander!

On Jun 15, Alexander Barkov wrote:
> > (preference matters, as it tells how to parse ambiguous strings like
> > "10:10:10").
> 
> I'd say '10:10:10' should be unambiguously treated as time.
> Colon is never used to delimit date parts. Is it?

yes, I believe delimiters are pretty much ignored in our code. so any
delimiter can be used anywhere.

> Date parts are usually delimited by as follows:
> '01-01-01'
> '01.01.01'
> '01/01/01'
> 
> But this is a kind of separate issue. Would you like me to create a task 
> for this?

The way it works now - after your patch - there's no much need for a
"preference" flag. The only issue I've uncovered in testing was related
to parsing strings with time preference. Like in

  WHERE time_column > '2010-12-11'

The code is

  my_bool str_to_time(const char *str, uint length, MYSQL_TIME *l_time,
                      ulonglong fuzzydate, MYSQL_TIME_STATUS *status)
  {
  ...
    /* Check first if this is a full TIMESTAMP */
    if (length >= 12)
    {                                             /* Probably full timestamp */
      (void) str_to_datetime(str, length, l_time,
                             (fuzzydate & ~TIME_TIME_ONLY) | TIME_DATETIME_ONLY,
                              status);

Which is very stupid, it decides solely on the string length. That is
'2010-12-11' is parsed as a time (when there's time preference), but
'10:11:12.123456' is parsed as a date (but fails and falls back to
time).

I would suggest to get rid of this ad hoc detection code (check the
length, try and fall back, etc). And use a systematic approach based on
patterns. Like

   patterns[]=
   {
     { 'yyyy-mm-dd' , parse_date },
     { 'hh:mm:ss.uuuuuu', parse_time },
     ...
   }

Note, I wrote "like". I do not mean literally these patterns or string
patterns whatsoever. I'd prefer something much faster.  May be some
compact "signature" number that describes the format, or may be a
decision tree (where the string is parsed into an array of ints and then
analyzed like three numbers? first is 4 digit? etc).

Regards,
Sergei