[ILUG] Perl / MySQL oddity

[Niall]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2000 at 03:31:22PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:

> > > $sth = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO $table $Fields VALUES (?,?,?,?,?,?,?)");
> > > $sth->execute(	$Description, substr($Description, 0, 50),
> > > 		$2, $Keywords, $UnixPath, $MacPath, $Volume);
> > 
> > I tried using this syntax at some stage but had some kind of problem with it
> > and didn't keep trying. However, 
> 
> Really?  What sort of problems did you have?

Well, I'd never used this syntax until the other day and then I read in Jay
Flaherty's "MySQL Perl DBI/DBD Manual Version 0.4" the following code snippet

my @names = ['Flaherty', 'Jones', 'Smith']; 
$dbh->{RaiseError} = 1; 
my $sth = $dbh->prepare("UPDATE contact SET phone = '555-1212'
WHERE last_name = ?");
$sth->execute(@names); 


Now as this appeared to do something which I needed to do at the time, I
assumed that it would do what I wanted i.e prepare a statement and execute
it for each element of @names. I haven't checked, but I now gather that
that's a mis-interpretation on my behalf, but in mitigation I was lead
astray by the snippet above, where presumably instead of 

$sth->execute(@names);

there should have been

for (@names) { $sth->execute($_) }

> Your problem is curious though.  

It is. Esp. given Thomas' latest information that the problem doesn't occur
with $1

> I've looked at the XS code for quote() and execute() but rapidly got lost 

You can sing that :-)

in there 

> (must dig out my perl internals book one of these days).

Book nothing - I'm not going back there without a H & K and a Kevlar vest. :-)



Regards,


Niall