This error arises as an interaction between the particular client used to connect to the server and the form of the function. To illustrate:
The following code will run without casualty in Netbeans 7, Squirrel, DbSchema, PgAdmin3
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION author.revision_number()
RETURNS trigger AS
$BODY$
begin
new.rev := new.rev + 1;
new.revised := current_timestamp;
return new;
end;
$BODY$
LANGUAGE plpgsql VOLATILE
COST 100;
Please note that the 'begin' statement comes immediately after the '$' quoted string.
The next code will halt all the above clients except PgAdmin3.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION author.word_count()
RETURNS trigger AS
$BODY$
declare
wordcount integer := 0; -- counter for words
indexer integer := 1; -- position in the whole string
charac char(1); -- the first character of the word
prevcharac char(1);
begin
while indexer <= length(new.blab) loop
charac := substring(new.blab,indexer,1); -- first character of string
if indexer = 1 then
prevcharac := ' '; -- absolute start of counting
else
prevcharac := substring(new.blab, indexer - 1, 1); -- indexer has increased
end if;
if prevcharac = ' ' and charac != ' ' then
wordcount := wordcount + 1;
end if;
indexer := indexer + 1;
end loop;
new.words := wordcount;
return new;
end;
$BODY$
LANGUAGE plpgsql VOLATILE
COST 100;
The crucial difference in the second example is the 'declare' section. The ploy of using back-slashes raises an error with PgAdmin3.
In summary I suggest trying different tools. Some tools even though they are supposed to be writing text files put invisible stuff into the text. Notoriously this occurs with the Unicode BOM which will halt any php file that tries to implement sessions or namespaces.
Whilst this is no solution I hope it helps.
sqlsupportssplitStatements="false"too. doc – Maynor