I have a bit of weirdness going on with selectrow_array(). Example:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use v5.14;

use DBI;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:Pg:dbname=$dbname', '$user', '$pass', {
AutoCommit => 0 } );

my ($text, $lang, $author) = $dbh->selectrow_array(
        q[ select(
                        text_element,
                        resource.language,
                        display_name)
                        from resource
                                join users on ( created_by = users.id 
+)
                        where short_id = '12345';]
        );

say $text;
say $lang;
say $author;

[download]

(Database name, user, and password replaced with placeholders for posting. No other changes.) Result:

("text_element_contents",eng,"Daniel Staal")
Use of uninitialized value $lang in say at perl_db_test.pl line 22.

Use of uninitialized value $author in say at perl_db_test.pl line 23.

[download]

So, instead of getting an array back, or even an array reference, I'm getting the entire result set as a string, which looks like an array. Any ideas what's going on here? (Note: it does the same with selectrow_arrayref() or selectrow_hashref(), except that the string is wrapped in an array/hash ref.)

(I have trimmed text_element_contents here as the actual contents are several kilobytes of text, but I get the same result with it left out entirely.)

Edit: Solved it! Weirdness... If you take out the parenthesis in the SQL statement (lines 13 and 16), it works. Now, why couldn't I have figured that out in the hour I've been beating my head against this before I posted on Perlmonks...

In reply to DBI weirdness: Arrays as strings. by DStaal

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