SPUG: Stupid Ascii question

[Peter Darley]

Colin,
	The Text::CSV_XS option seems very close to the Data::Dumper option, which
I guess I would prefer since it creates more human readable (at least to me)
output.
	It looks like the consensus is that I should use something to create a
string for me that will take care of all the escaping of separators and
such.  I'll probably use Data::Dumper.
Thanks everyone,
Peter Darley

-----Original Message-----
From: Colin Meyer [mailto:cmeyer at helvella.org]
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 10:56 AM
To: Peter Darley
Cc: SPUG
Subject: Re: SPUG: Stupid Ascii question


On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 09:54:44AM -0700, 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.

I would suggest two alternatives. Since you are already using a
database, which does a good job of keeping separate fields, you could
use another table to hold the deleted records. This table would simply
have the same columns as the original table. Trying to encode and decode
fields from a string seems like a lot of extra work that the db is quite
capable of.

Another option would be to use Text::CSV_XS. This is a module that is
very good at joining and splitting fields to and from strings. You can
select the separator character, or let it use the default comma (which
it automatically escapes within your fields).

Have fun,
-Colin.


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