[thelist] MySQL data typesL

[noah]

At 07:34 PM 16/01/2002, Brent Rieck wrote:
>I believe that's where your problem is: "" is a zero length string
>(which MySQL will interpret as the numerical value 0), and NULL is,
>well, null - and they're *not* equivalent.  When inserting nulls specify
>the value as NULL with no quotes.  (in the "test" table from my previous
>email it would look like: "insert into test values (NULL);")

Thanks - that makes sense.

Seems like a bit of a hassle, though, since all inserts then need to be 
preceded with a bunch of these:

if ($foo == "") {
   $foo = NULL;
}

I'm sure that this is justified by some use to zero length strings (as 
opposed to nulls) in numerical columns that has just never occurred to me.

Cheers,
Noah