Hello, after having talked to Derick Rethans at LinuxTag and him suggesting I put up a mail on php-dev about it, I guess I will give it a try.
The following is my issue: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=16960 Derick told me all of PHPs database extensions simpy return strings for everything except NULLs and that changing this behaviour will brake code existing out there. As I do not believe it will, this is why I felt it might be worth discussing it. As people rely on the fact (do they?) that what "comes out of" sybase_fetch_row() is an array of strings, they will probably do something like this to check on NULLs: if (!$data['field_to_test_on_null_values']) { do_something(); } This will, of course, not be broken. !(null) = !(false) = true Whatever you do with fields containing numbers (int, float) will not be affected by my patch either: $num= $data['count']+ 1; will be equivalent whether $data['count'] is int(5) or string(1) "5", except PHP will no longer need to automagically make string(1) "5" to int(5) before performing the addition, right? What I do right now: ------------------------------------------------------------------ $result= sybase_query($sql, $this->handle); if (FALSE === $result) return FALSE; $i= -1; while (++$i < @sybase_num_fields($result)) { $field= sybase_fetch_field($result, $i); $this->fields[$field->name]= $field->type; } [...and later on, when fetching the results...] $row= sybase_fetch_array($query); if (FALSE === $row) return FALSE; foreach($row as $key=> $val) { if ($val === FALSE) { $row[$key]= NULL; continue; } switch ($this->fields[$key]) { case 'bit': case 'int': settype($row[$key], 'integer'); break; case 'real': // very ugly ["numeric(10)" => int, "numeric(10, 2)" => double] if (floor($val) == $val) { settype($row[$key], 'integer'); } else { settype($row[$key], 'double'); } break; } } ------------------------------------------------------------------ ...which of course is overhead. I'd like to get rid of it but of course not break any code. My question is, is there anybody out there using Sybase who can think of impacts from my patch(es)? Greetings from Karlsruhe, Timm -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
