in reply to Re: DBI Long File names?
in thread DBI Long File names?

I thought so too. However, neither the use of single quotes nor the $dbobject->quote method works. I read some about placeholders but I don't see an example where they are used for a tablename. Also the Win32 perldoc is drainbamaged and doesn't support unix style searches. If you have a copy of 'Programming the Perl DBI' page number quotes would be helpful. I read a bit on pg 194... but the explanation seems a bit sparse.

UPDATE Place Holders don't appear to be the solution.
Page 221 of Programming the Perl DBI:

     "SELECT name,age FROM ?" # wrong will probably fail.

With most drivers, placeholders can't be used for any element of a sta
+tement that would prevent the database server from validating the sta
+tement and creating a query execution plan for it.

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This seems to imply the problem may lie in the driver? (I'm guessing) Am I off base with this? I also added the following snippet to try to capture the table name from the database and then open the table. Again everything works when 8.3 names are used. I get the extra character in SQL statement error for the weird names.

Comment out or replace read_log(shift) with get_table_list(shift) in the first listing and add the following subroutine. It is supposed to print the table name then dump the table for every table in the database. 

sub get_table_list ($) {
    my $log = shift;
    my $dbobject = DBI->connect("DBI:XBase:".$basedir.$logdir)
        or die $DBI::errstr;
    my @tables = $dbobject->tables;
    print "Database contains the following tables:\n__________________
+______\n";
    foreach my $table (@tables) {
        print "$table\n";
        read_log($table);
    }
    print"\n\n";
        $dbobject->disconnect;
}

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Re: Re: Re: DBI Long File names?
by iburrell (Chaplain) on Sep 30, 2003 at 17:22 UTC
    Placeholders and $dbi->quote don't work with table and field names. They only work for data elements.

    For identifiers, each database has its own quoting mechanism. The ANSI standard is double quotes: 

    SELECT foo FROM "$bar"

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    SQL Server uses square brackets: 
    SELECT foo FROM [$bar]

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    New versions of DBI have the $dbi->quote_identifier method. It can be used the same as $dbi->quote 

    my $quoted_log = $dbi->quote_identifier($log)
my $sql = "SELECT foo FROM $quoted_log";

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    This may be new enough that DBD::XBase does not support. Then you will have to find out what quoting mechanism it uses and use that.

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[d/l]
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      Neither quoting mechanism nor the quote_identifier method worked. I also attempted low-level access directly through ::XBase which resulted in an 'invalid argument' for long file names. Any one know of an alternative to DBD::XBASE or ::XBase to read/write .dbf files? Specifically Foxpro files?
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      Thanks for the information. Unfortunately none of the methods of quoting worked for me. So ... I suppose this means that DBD::XBASE may be broken. I am going to go dive into that now and see if it has some weird quote mechanism or not.
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