--- James Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Just reconfirming with you and solidifying my knowledge. > The reason it returns "" is because: when working with > native pascal types, assigning null to a string results > in an empty string "" right ? > > cheers > James
James, Pascal is a strongly typed language and there is no Pascal string precisely equivalent to a NULL. Someone (either the SQLite authors or the one who wrote the Pascal wrapper) decided to automatically translate NULL into empty (zero-length) strings. And it's impossible now to distinguish actual null values from fields containing actual zero-length strings. You could solve this in several ways: 1) re-write all the code to return and store a more complex record (as suggested in a previous post) that include a string and a boolean, this record completely and precisely captures the data SQL is returning; 2) re-write the code that does the automatic translation to insert the string 'NULL' (in which case, you will never be able to distinguish NULL's from actual fields containing the value 'NULL'--but maybe this is no problem); 3) you could simply avoid ever having empty strings in your database (in which case, empty strings returned are always NULL's) 4) Live with not being able to distinguish, in many instances, an empty string is practically the same as a NULL (in other instances, however, it indicates that some records in a full join failed to find a match) HTH, -Alan __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
