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Message-ID: <39629D1A.E6C8B9CD@cascadepg.com>
Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 19:27:38 -0700
From: Dan Rosner <rosner@cascadepg.com>
Reply-To: rosner@scn.org
Organization: Cascade Programming Group
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To: pgsql-interfaces@postgresql.org
Subject: Inserting null values into a float4 field using Perl DBI
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Greetings!

Would anyone mind educating me about how to properly 
insert null values into a postgresql float4 field
using perl DBI?  I keep getting 0 in the field, instead 
of a NULL value as I would expect.

Background: 

I'm using placeholders with DBI to read in data from a 
file.  I do this a lot, as in this example:

my $sth = $dbh->prepare_cached( q{
INSERT INTO mytable (field1, field2, field3) VALUES (?, ?, ?)
         })  ;

  open (FH, "< $path") 
           or die "Unable to open $path: $!";
      while (<FH>) {
             chop;
             my ($field1, $field2, $field3) = split /,/;
             $sth->execute($field1, $field2, $field3);
         }
         close (FH);


The sample file I'm reading has some Null values
and looks like this:

1,2,3
4,,6
2,,6
7,8,
12,13,14

However, these values turn up in postgres table as 0, not NULL.
When I do a select on the data read in with DBI, I get:

1,2,3
4,0,6
2,0,6
7,8,0
12,13,14

Would anyone mind telling me what I'm missing and/or point me to 
an example of how to do this properly.  I'm using DBD::Pg 0.93 and 
postgres 7.02 on both NT and Linux.  Thanks!

Dan