From: Meino Christian Cramer <Meino.Cramer@...>
Date: 2003-08-29T23:28:28+09:00
Subject: Quoted string problem

Hi,

 I have a """database""" of 11513 shortwave transmitters with their
 frequency, on-air time and a lot of other informations.
 These database is in a "flat ascii file": Each broadcaster gets one
 line of 294 charcters. Each "column" is only sperated from the others
 by known offsets.

 My little ruby program reads line by line (broadcaster by
 broadcaster) from this file and excerpts the wanted informations by
 expressions like "frequncy = line[22..27]".

 Then an sql-statement is formed and sent to mysqld, which inserts the
 data into the database.

 So far so nice...

 BUT!
 
 There is one filed called "comment" in the database, where ANYTHING
 printable can be exspected.

 One line says has a comment like 

			   International service "A".

 At this point, mysqld jumps from the rail and says "STOP! SYNTAX
 VIOLATED".

 Generally: how can I process input to escape "special" characters
 before I send them to mysqld?
 
 (In perl there is a command called "quotemeta", which does the
 thing...I found nothing equivalent in the docs for ruby).

 Kind regards and thank you very much for your help in advance.
 Meino