From: Meino Christian Cramer <Meino.Cramer@...>
Date: 2003-08-30T16:05:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Quoted string problem

From: Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <hgs@dmu.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Quoted string problem
Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 08:29:11 +0900

 Hi Hugh,

 Thanks for your reply !

> 
> > Hi,
> >
> >  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.
>         [...]
> >  Generally: how can I process input to escape "special" characters
> 
> Regexp.escape(aString)
> 
> >  before I send them to mysqld?
> >
> >  (In perl there is a command called "quotemeta", which does the
> 
> Regexp.escape is also known as:  Regexp.quote(aString)
> >
>         Hugh
> 
> 

This is (nearly) exactly for what I have searched for...

Unfortunately the "'" is not escaped and this character is that,
what make my headache...

I have a broadcaster called "N'Djamena".

The "'" in its name confuses the string sent to mySQL...

I tried (with irb) the following. But I cannot figure out, what
game ruby is playing with me... ;)

(in irb:)

>> a="N'Djamena"
=> "N'Djamena"
>> a
=> "N'Djamena"
>> a.gsub( "'","X")
=> "NXDjamena"
>> a.gsub( "'","\'")
=> "N'Djamena"
>> a.gsub( "'","\\\'")
=> "NDjamenaDjamena"
>> 

What is happening here. I exspected the last expression to be
evalutated to "N\'Djamena".

But I am a ruby newbie, so ruby is right and me is wrong....but why
and what ?

By the way: I tried DBI but it seems not 1.8.0-ready ? I got a lot
of errors...

Now I am using ruby-mysql-0.2.1.tar.gz, which works fine...
beside my "special-char" problems.

I am happy, if you could give me an additional tip/hint...

Thank you very much in advance !

Keep hacking!
Meino