PHP 4.0 Bug #5954: Informix can't reliably figure if a text result column is NULL

From: mlemos@acm.org Operating system: Linux RH 6 PHP version: 4.0 Latest CVS (04/08/2000) PHP Bug Type: Other Bug description: Informix can't reliably figure if a text result column is NULL There is the ifx_nullformat to tell wether NULL are returned as empty strings or a string that has the text "NULL" in it. Either forms can be valid result values for character string result columns. There needs to be a better solution. Suggestion: make Informix support work more like Oracle support that optionally does not set the entries of the result row array returned by ifx_fetch_row. This could be implemented with a new function for instance named ifx_returnnullcolumns that would take an argument that would set a an boolean option. null columns would only be returned if this option is true and that would be the default value to remain compatible with the current PHP-Informix API. Adding this new function would be a better solution than adding an extra mode option to ifx_nullformat because it would be easier detect if this option is available using the function_defined() function.