SPUG: Stupid Ascii question

[Adrian Hands]

Are you storing the deleted records in the database or on the filesystem
?

Writing non-printable chars to a file shouldn't be a problem - you
might need to use "binmode" though.

Technically, since you probably can't really guarantee that the data
doesn't contain non-printable characters, you should use some scheme of
quoting any instances of your delimiter within the file before joining
the fields.
E.g. If your delimter is $delim:

 s@\\@\\\\@g; # quote any backslashes
 s@$delim@\\$delim at g; # quote any delimiter

or there's probably modules you could for unicoding.

>>> Dan Ebert <mathin at mathin.com> 08/15/02 01:30PM >>>

I have often used a separator like :::: (four colons), since the
chances
of that occuring in the data fields I wanted to parse was slim to none.

That way you wouldn't have to worry about using non-printable chars. 
It
does take up more bytes than a single char though.

Dan.


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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-- 
Dan Ebert      <mathin at mathin.com>
----------------------------------------------------------
"If you're right 90% of the time, why quibble about the remaining 3%?"


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