----- Original Message -----
From: "Mitch Helle-Morrissey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 5:22 PM
Subject: RE: mapping NULL values
> That is a good way to hide the warnings. Another reason that I'd like to
be
> able to specify what NULL comes out as is that I may want to display null
> differently in different applications. For example, Sybase has bcp which
is
> a bulk upload utility. When I want to make bcp files, they are just
> pipe-delimited text files with NULL fields represented by the absence of a
> value:
>
> 1||Mitch|December
>
> So in that case I might want to print out NULL values as "". But when I
> print things for humans, (say a web entry screen), I'd rather see "NULL"
> where a null value is.
>
> 1|NULL|Mitch|December
>
> Certainly I could do this mapping myself, but I'd rather not do it every
> place I fetch rows. Also, I'm sure it would be much more efficient for
DBI
> to handle it internally. Especially when we're talking about a lot of
rows.
> And it seems like it wouldn't be that difficult of a thing to add.
>
Your problem is not a database problem, but a presentation problem.
So to keep things clean you should solve it when representing the data and
not in the database interface.
So you could write two special print subs to print rows, or special subs to
transform rowdata.
example:
print join "|", (null_to_empty(undef, "foo",undef, "bar") );
print join "|", null_to_text(undef, "foo",undef, "bar");
sub null_to_text{
return map{defined $_ ? $_ : "NULL"}@_;
}
sub null_to_empty{
return map{defined $_ ? $_ : ""}@_;
}
