Perl DBI and NULL vales from MSSQL

Asheep has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello, I'm using FreeTDS to connect to MSSQL with great success, so far... But when I output a row that contains a field with a sql <NULL> value I get "Use of uninitialized value".. Is it common to write a function to compare all each field fetched to a undef and replace the literal value with "NULL" or such.. Before you print out a value? Isn't this a waste to run a function on every fetch? Hey monks, what is the better way?

Comment on Perl DBI and NULL vales from MSSQL

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Re: Perl DBI and NULL vales from MSSQL by sachmet (Scribe) on Apr 30, 2001 at 21:06 UTC
Yes. You get an undef whenever the field is null, because you might actually want to store the value 'NULL' in a field for some reason. If you care to print out a NULL in the case of an undef, you can always do: `while (my $row = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref) { foreach my $field (@$row) { $field = '(NULL)' unless defined($field); } ... (the rest of your code) ... }` [download] and that should take care of your problem.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Perl DBI and NULL vales from MSSQL by thabenksta (Pilgrim) on Apr 30, 2001 at 21:07 UTC
Is it common to write a function to compare all each field fetched to a undef and replace the literal value with "NULL" or such.. Before you print out a value? You shouldn't have to do that. It should just return NULL automatically. I might be able to help more if you showed me the code you are working with. -thabenksta `my $name = 'Ben Kittrell'; $name=~s/^(.+)\s(.).+$/\L$1$2/g; my $nick = 'tha' . $name . 'sta';` [download]	[reply] [d/l]