Dear Simon, I'm not too clear about your answer. Could you please elaborate?
Your response about zero length strings certainly helps with my understanding of the output of select statements, in that when you see a blank field it is probably a string with no content. Most of what I am dealing with are text files with missing or non applicable column details, as well as infrequent records with comments tacked onto the end. To make it clear to myself whilst I'm messing with and confirming the data, I've taken to setting the nullvalue to "¬" - a legacy of IBM keyboards which is never used. This makes it clear to me that a field is definitely null as opposed to a zero length string. Sincerly, Matthew --- On Sat, 13/8/11, Simon Slavin <slav...@bigfraud.org> wrote: From: Simon Slavin <slav...@bigfraud.org> Subject: Re: [sqlite] null handling import To: "General Discussion of SQLite Database" <sqlite-users@sqlite.org> Date: Saturday, 13 August, 2011, 14:43 On 13 Aug 2011, at 7:58am, matthew (matthew.jsoft) white wrote: > I've modified all scripts which replaces empty strings with 'null' , and > every things hunky dory. I was just wondering if sq3 has some kind of > mechanism to parse blank records as null instead of empty strings. Probably not, since all the parts of SQLite consider the two things to be completely different. A zero-length string is a known string value that has no characters in it. A NULL value is a sign that you don't know what value belongs in that field. There are plenty of places where you might find some records with one and other records with the other, and your application must treat them differently. Simon. _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
