SQL wierdness

Submitted: Sunday, April 25, 1999 22:05

Ok, I think I just weeded the last of those nasty NULL thingees where question marks should be. For some reason, either MySQL or the Perl interface to it chose to substitute said string wherever I had a question mark, UNLESS I had an apostrophe ("'") character somewhere before it in the string to be inserted. Total wierdness. Anyway, the problem went away when I started using single quotes instead of double quotes in my INSERT and UPDATE statements. So I've been going through all my movielog entries and random ramblings grep-ing for "NULL". Oh, the joys!

This problem also forced me to hack together a mechanism for editing random ramblings entries. Something I wasn't planning to do. Ya know, keeping it spontatious means no going back and revising my words in this section. Except when the database throws ugly NULLs wherever my question marks go. That?s just as bad as these idiotic web pages where people?s html editors can?t seem to figure out the difference between a question mark and an apostrophe. Well, anyway, that?s fixed now. Right? ;)

Back on track. I'm thinking I'll add a field for the time I started writing the entry. It should be pretty easy. Just stick a hidden field in the CGI form to record the time the page I'm viewing right now using loads. In fact, I think I'll implement it right now. It's certainly more fun than trying to study for tomorrow's Systems Analysis and BS test. :)