SPUG: while question

[ced at carios2.ca.boeing.com]

> while ($MyData = $sth->fetchrow())
> {
>         stuff
> }
> 
>         This falls down when the data returned from the statement is '0', since
> it's not true, and the while breaks.  I've tried while (defined $MyData =
> $sth->fetchrow()), but this is not syntacticly correct, and would break on a
> database NULL (which is undef in perl) anway.  I can do something like while
> ($MyRef = $sth->fetchrow_hashref()) {$MyData = $$MyRef{datapoint}; stuff},
> but I'm not too fond of that.  Does anyone have a suggestion on a better way
> to construct this loop?

I'm not sure why fetchrow_hashref doesn't make the cut but  
you could fetch the list rather than the scalar: 

while ( ($item) = fetchrow_array() )  {
  

In general, though, this'll still be slower than just returning a ref. 
with fetchrow_hashref() or fetch().

--
Charles DeRykus