Re: NULLS vs Empty result in PHP

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Philip Thompson <philthathril@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sep 23, 2009, at 9:48 AM, Dan Shirah wrote: > >>> >>> From reading the other responses to this thread, it seems that you want >>> to >>> "skip" or "exclude" rows in the results where my_column === null. >>> >>> If this is correct, why not do it in the SELECT statement to begin with? >>> >>> $my_query = "SELECT my_column FROM my_database WHERE my_column IS NOT >>> NULL"; >>> >>> That should do it. >>> >> >> I want to exclude the rows that might be NULL, "" (empty), or "       >>  " >> (empty series of spaces) >> >> From all of the input so far, it seems that using trim() on the variable >> and >> then use empty() is the best way to pick all three types up. > > I don't think you're using mysql, but your selected db may have a similar > option. I would do the work in the sql. > > <?php > $sql = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE > TRIM(column) <> '' AND > column IS NOT > NULL"; > $result = query($sql); > while ($row = fetch_row ($result)) { >    echo "Not empty, multiple spaces or NULL!"; > } > ?> > > So, if you have any extraneous spaces, they will be removed. It also > accounts for nulls. No work is required by PHP to determine the values you > need. Just use what it returns. This should work. > > Hope this helps. > ~Philip > > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > Another thought might be to convert the nulls into another value select field1, field2, ISNULL(field3,'-') from table where ... would convert the nulls into hyphens -- Bastien Cat, the other other white meat