coalesce for null AND empty strings - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Ferdinand Gassauer
Subject coalesce for null AND empty strings
Date
Msg-id 200703281450.59194.gassauer@kde.org
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: coalesce for null AND empty strings  (Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com>)
Re: coalesce for null AND empty strings  (Alban Hertroys <alban@magproductions.nl>)
Re: coalesce for null AND empty strings  (Lew <lew@nospam.lewscanon.com>)
List pgsql-general
Hi!

it would be great to have a coalesce2 function which treats empty strings as
null values.

as far as I have seen, there are a lot of comments and coding solutions about
this, but none is an "easy" one and all make the code a bit more complicated
and more difficult to maintain.

I have created this function.
It's similar to nullif, but takes only  ONE argument

create or replace function "empty2null"(text_i varchar)
returns varchar as $$
declare
text_p varchar;
begin
if text_i = ''
 then text_p := null;
 else text_p := text_i;
end if;
return text_p;
end;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;


--
cu
Ferdinand

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