SPUG: while question

[Adrian Hands]

The real problem here is fetchrow() returns a list and you're assigning it to a scalar.
Simply add some parens and your while loop will no longer incorrectly break on zero.
I.e.:

 while ( ( $MyData ) = $sth->fetchrow() )


Peter Darley wrote:

> Folks,
> 	I have yet another stupid question:
> 
> 	I regularly get data out of a DBI statement handle by doing:
> 
> 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?
> 
> Thanks,
> Peter Darley