Is N prefix allowed in MySQL - mysql

I am converting views from MSSQL to MySQL. I came across a statement like
SELECT CODE, DESCRIPTION
FROM PARAMETERMASTER
WHERE (CODETYPE = N'CASTTYPE')
Does MySQL support N prefix? Is it necessary to keep "N" prefix in MySQL also?

The following articles have some good information on the question. The short answer is just that there's a type mismatch between the unicode column and non-unicode string literal you're using. From the KB article, it looks like omitting the N prefix might still work in some cases, but it would depend on the code page and collation settings of the database. That might explain the change in behavior, if you were previously having success with the no-prefix method.
http://databases.aspfaq.com/general/why-do-some-sql-strings-have-an-n-prefix.html
http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/239530/en-us

There is no N prefix for MySQL literal strings. There is something similar, but I have never seen it used. Simply quote whatever text you want.

Related

In SQL tables, should I, for example, have "é" or should I have "e´"?

I have tried in vain to look up relevant questions. They are beyond my pay scale. I am not a professional. To explain this a bit more: in the HTML that I wrote, the em dash would be "& #151;" (that space inserted so it would not show up as an actual em dash). It ended up in the tables (someone else was doing that work) as "—". Those are not showing up correctly when searches are done using PHP. I only get the image with a question mark. I do have my SQL account set to Unicode.
Take a philosophical stand: The datastore (database table) should contain data, not some special encoding of the data.
The "data" is é
When you display that in HTML, you might need to convert it to e´. However, all modern browsers don't have a problem if é is encoded UTF-8.
If you choose to use "html entities", then have your application do the conversion after fetching é from the table. PHP has the function htmlentities() specifically for that task.
But, I still have not addressed what byte(s) are in the table to represent é. These days, you 'should' use UTF-8 (aka MySQL's utf8mb4). That would be two hex bytes C3A9, which can be discovered using SELECT HEX(col) .... If you use the old default, latin1, the hex would show C9.
A related question is whether you should store html 'tags' or construct the html on the fly after fetching the data. So, let me give you three philosophies; you pick which to apply:
The table contains pure data; formatting, etc, is done after fetching and before delivering to the user's browser.
The table contains an 'opaque' image of what needs to be sent to the browser -- complete with tags, entities, etc. With this approach, you may as well call it a BLOB, not TEXT.
Some compromise between those. Note: The use of CSS can avoid too much hard-coding of formatting before storing into the database.
Also, the first choice is much cleaner for searching. This may lead you to pick it. However, another approach is to have two columns -- one aimed at delivering mostly-formatted ouput; the other for searching (tags removed, no entities, etc); it would be mostly text, but you probably could not generate a web page (with links, paragraphs, etc) from it.
é -- different strokes for different folks
é in latin1 (not advised) hex E9, 1 byte
é in utf8 C3A9 2 bytes
\u00E9 -- Unicode codepoint -- 6 bytes
é -- html entity (see PHP's htmlentities()) -- 8 bytes
%C3%A9 -- PHP's urlencode() (for URLs) -- 6 bytes
Responding to Comments
If entries_lists, entries_languages, and authors_entries are many:many mapping tables, please consider the several optimizations mentioned here.
Do not use utf8_encode. Instead, figure out what caused them not to be encoded correctly, and/or not displayed correctly. Start by
echo bin2hex($record['author']);
SELECT name, HEX(name) FROM authors WHERE ...
for some author with an accented letter.

mySQL replace string + additional string with a static value

Unlike PHP, I don't believe mySQL has any preg_replace() feature, only matching via REGEXP. Here are the strings I have in the code:
http://ourcompany.com/theapplestore/...
http://ourcompany.com/anotherstore/...
http://ourcompany.com/yetanotherstore/...
As you can see, there is a constant in there, http://ourcompany.com/, but there is also a variable string namely theapplestore, anotherstore, etc. etc.
I want to replace the constant string, plus the variable string(s), and then the trailing slash (/) after the variable string(s), with a single shortcode value, namely {{store url=''}}
EDIT
If it helps, the store codes are always the same length, they are going to be
sch131785
sch185399
sch634019
etc.
i.e., they are all 9 characters long
How would I do this? Thanks.
I thought this might be useful: there is currently NO WAY to do this in mysql. Find using REGEXP, yes; replace, no. That said, there is another post with an extension library mentioned, sagi:
Is there a MySQL equivalent of PHP's preg_replace?
MariaDB-10.0.5 has REGEXP_REPLACE(), REGEXP_INSTR() and REGEXP_SUBSTR()
You can use following regex,
(ourcompany.com\/\w+\/)
Demo
Uses the concept of Group Capture

MUMPS can't format Number to String

I am trying to convert larg number to string in MUMPS but I can't.
Let me explain what I would like to do :
s A="TEST_STRING#12168013110012340000000001"
s B=$P(A,"#",2)
s TAB(B)=1
s TAB(B)=1
I would like create an array TAB where variable B will be a primary key for array TAB.
When I do ZWR I will get
A="TEST_STRING#12168013110012340000000001"
B="12168013110012340000000001"
TAB(12168013110012340000000000)=1
TAB("12168013110012340000000001")=1
as you can see first SET recognize variable B as a number (wrongly converted) and second SET recognize variable B as a string ( as I would like to see ).
My question is how to write SET command to recognize variable B as a string instead of number ( which is wrong in my opinion ).
Any advice/explanation will be helpful.
This may be a limitation of sorting/storage mechanism built into MUMPS and is different between different MUMPS implementations. The cause is that while variable values in MUMPS are non typed, index values are -- and numeric indices are sorted before string ones. When converting a large string to number, rounding errors may occur. To prevent this from happening, you need to add a space before number in your index to explicitly treat it as string:
s TAB(" "_B)=1
As far as I know, Intersystems Cache doesn't have this limitation -- at least your code works fine in Cache and in documentation they claim to support up to 309 digits:
http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20141/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GGBL_structure#GGBL_C12648
I've tried to recreate your scenario, but I am not seeing the issue you're experiencing.
It actually is not possible ( in my opinion ) for the same command executed immediately ( one execution after another) to produce two different results.
s TAB(B)=1
s TAB(B)=1
for as long the value of B did not change between the executions, the result should be:
TAB("12168013110012340000000001")=1
Example of what GT.M implementation of MUMPS returns in your case

MySQL integer comparison ignores trailing alpha characters

So lets just say I have a table with just an ID is an int. I have discovered that running:
SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE ID = '32anystring';
Returns the row where id = 32. Clearly 32 != '32anystring'.
This seems very strange. Why does it do this? Can it be turned off? What is the best workaround?
It is common behavior in most programming languages to interpret leading numerals as a number when converting a string to a number.
There are a couple of ways to handle this:
Use prepared statements, and define the placeholder where you are putting the value to be of a numeric type. This will prevent strings from being put in there at all.
Check at a higher layer of the application to validate input and make sure it is numeric.
Use the BINARY keyword in mysql (I'm just guessing that this would work, have never actually tried it as I've always just implemented a proper validation system before running a query) -
SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE BINARY ID = '32anystring';
You need to read this
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/type-conversion.html
When you work on, or compare two different types, one of them will be converted to the other.
MySQL conversion of string->number (you can do '1.23def' * 2 => 2.46) parses as much as possible of the string as long as it is still a valid number. Where the first letter cannot be part of a number, the result becomes 0

mumps query related to %%

What is the meaning of I $E(R%%,I%%)>1 ? and why using %%?
Actually, if you are talking about Standard MUMPS (not any particular implementation)
the R%% is illegal syntax. I have seen the non-standard use of % in extensions to MUMPS, such as EsiObjects or InterSystems Cache Object Script, but the use in the question above is actually nonsense in standard MUMPS.
There is no particular significance to %%. Its just part of the variable name and I still don't understand MUMPS community obsession with using % in variable names and making them more obscure.
so the statement means IF $EXTRACT(R%%,I%%)>1 i.e if the extracted value from the string R%% at position I%% is greater than 1, do some more obscure stuff.
$EXTRACT(string,from) extracts a
single character in the position
specified by from. The from value can
be an integer count from the beginning
of the string, an asterisk specifying
the last character of the string, or
an asterisk with a negative integer
specifying a count backwards from the
end of the string.
Link to documentation: http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20102/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=RCOS_fextract