SPUG: Stupid Ascii question

[Creede Lambard]

I'm not sure if there will be any problems with chr(31) as a field
separator -- my inclination would be to try it and see -- but I have to
wonder, why do you want to have the character be non-printing? If you
use a visible but uncommon character like the pipe, you have a good idea
where your records break into fields. Or better yet, use a tab, which is
both whitespace and easily represented in a print string (\t) and still
only takes up one character in your field.

On Thu, 2002-08-15 at 09:54, Peter Darley wrote:
> Friends,
> 	I am working with database stuff and I want to store deleted database
> records, so there's a history of what was in the database.  I have chosen to
> do this by having my front end app, written in Perl, put all the field names
> and values into a single string separated by a non-printing Ascii character
> which I can just do a split() on later to return a hash of the record, which
> is exactly what I would get if I did a fetchrow_hashref() on the original
> record.
> 	My question is this; what non-printing Ascii character can I use for this?
> I wanted to use chr(0), the ascii null, but postgresql or DBD::Pg or DBI or
> something chokes on it.  I went with chr(31) which is described as 'unit
> separator'.  I'm worried that there may be some unexpected interaction with
> file systems or something that I'm unaware of, so I thought I'd ask y'all.
> Thanks,
> Peter Darley
> 
> 
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-- 
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` / V \  . Creede Lambard                : Live in a world of your own,
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