Question

Without using plpgsql, I’m trying to urlencode a given text within a pgsql SELECT statement.

The problem with this approach:

select regexp_replace('héllo there','([^A-Za-z0-9])','%' || encode(E'\\1','hex'),'g') 

…is that the encode function is not passed the regexp parameter, unless there’s another way to call functions from within the replacement expression that actually works. So I’m wondering if there’s a replacement expression that, by itself, can encode matches into hex values.

There may be other combinations of functions. I thought there would be a clever regex (and that may still be the answer) out there, but I’m having trouble finding it.

Answer 1

select regexp_replace(encode('héllo there','hex'),'(..)',E'%\\1','g'); 

This doesn’t leave the alphanumeric characters human-readable, though.