Actually the field name is desc1. ok, here's the code:

use CGI qw(:all);
use DBI;
use Data::Dumper;
use strict;
use warnings;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:ODBC:boutique', {RaiseError => 1, PrintErr
+or => 1} ); # data source set up in /etc/odbc.ini
my $fields = "";
my $table = "articles";
my $sql;
my $query;
my $column_info;
my $result;
my ($i, $j);

# here i'm getting all field names
# leaving out the ones that seem to be
# incompatible

$query = $dbh->column_info('','',$table,'');
$column_info = $query->fetchall_arrayref();
for $i ( 0 .. $#{$column_info} ) {
   if ($column_info->[$i][3]  !~ /[\s-]/) {
      $fields .= " $column_info->[$i][3],";
   }
}
chop $fields;

#$sql = "SELECT $fields FROM $table";
$sql = "SELECT * FROM $table";
$query = $dbh->prepare($sql);
$query->execute;
$result = $query->fetchall_arrayref();
#print Dumper($result);
for $i ( 0 .. $#{$result} ) {
   for $j ( 0 .. $#{$result->[$i]} ) {
      if ($result->[$i][$j] eq ""){
         print qq~<b>NULL</b>~;
      } else {
         print qq~$result->[$i][$j]~;
      }
   }
   print qq~\n~;
}

$query->finish();
$dbh->disconnect();
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