Sender: wadeb
Message-ID: <37603EAC.C50BDC87@ap.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 15:39:40 -0700
From: Wade Burgett <wadeb@ap.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: pgsql-interfaces@postgresql.org, wadeb@burgettsys.com
Subject: Choppin' Blanks with DBI and DBD::Pg
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A bit of a newbie perl hacker here but I am having some problems getting
the whitespace removed from the end of my records.  I am not sure
whether this is due to my stuffing the hash incorrectly or some
misunderstanding of DBD-DBI and the ChopBlanks attribute, or the cosmic
random factor.

When I return records from my database (using the slect statement below)
I get the full field length of characters, which includes whitespace,
which I don't want.  It looked like what I wanted was the ChopBlanks
attribute from DBD:Pg

here's the man:
    ChopBlanks (boolean,inherited)
        Supported by the driver as proposed by DBI. This
           method is similar to the SQL-function RTRIM.
  sounds like it takes off trailing whitespace (but I could be wrong
here).

Here's my perl:

#initialize options
%MyAtts = ('ChopBlanks',True);

#Connection to database (OBject)
$dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:Pg:dbname=$database");

if ( !defined $dbh ) {
                                   die "Cannot do \$dbh->connect:
$DBI::errstr\n";
     };
#Prepare then execute query
$sth = $dbh->prepare("Select firstname, lastname, username, passwd,
username, winpasswd from $table where unixdone ='N'",\%MyAtts );
$sth->execute;

Things I tried:

using 1 instead of true in ChopBlanks
not using the \ in front of %ChopBLanks after the select statement
(generates error).
initializing the hash w/ => syntax (no change)

Thanks for any help.  Aplogies if this is some sillly syntax error (but
my -w isn't complaining so ? )


Wade