On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 11:01:17PM -0800, Jonathan Leffler wrote: > Tim Bunce wrote: > > >I'd appreciate any input from driver authors who either: > > > >a) set ChopBlanks on by default (which they probably shouldn't) > > Not guilty (referring to DBD::Informix, of course). Is ChopBlanks > settable in the DBI->connect? > If not, please can we make it so (and if it is, thanks, and when did > that happen - and I know it was probably 5 years ago, but ...)
Probably 5 years ago :) > >or > >b) don't want ChopBlanks extended to VARCHAR fields > > I take the view that trailing blanks are nominally significant in a > VARCHAR field. If you want to provide ChopBlanks functionality for > VARCHAR too, use a separate attribute ChopVarcharBlanks or something. > > I fully accept that distinguishing an empty string from a NULL is hard > work - I don't want to explain what Informix does, but it does manage to > do it for VARCHARs at the storage level. It's just a real pain at the > client side (meaning for DBD::Informix). > > >(Let's defer the issue of which _specific_ string types ChopBlanks > >should apply to for now and just consider CHAR and VARCHAR's at > >this point.) > > OK. NCHAR and CHAR should be chopped. VARCHAR and NVARCHAR should not. > Anything else is not fully standard. Speaking personally, I don't think > text blobs should be chopped for the same reasons that varchar should > not - they are nominally significant. Ok, thanks. Tim.
