SPUG: Stupid Ascii question

[Trevor Leffler]

Peter,

I can't say that any non-printing ascii character would or wouldn't work for 
you.  However, I offer these two solutions:

1.  You could use a printing character, and encode any instances of that 
character in the data.  For example, you might get away with using "," as a 
delimiter and encode all other instances as "%2C".  Obviously this makes the 
assumption that the data will not already contain the string "%2C".

2.  You could construct a hash of your field names and the corresponding values, 
and then serialize the structure with, for example, Storable.pm.  You can then 
store this serialized structure to your database.  Apache::Session is a module 
that does this.

As an aside, since it appears that you're logging this data to your DB, which is 
choking, have you considered logging to text files?  They make for great logs: 
easily accessible, readable, gzip-able, archive-able, backup-able.

--Trevor

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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