Re: bytea on windows perl client - Mailing list pgsql-interfaces

James Orr wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 July 2002 13:06, Joe Conway wrote:
> 
>>>\211PNG\015\012\000 and so on.
>>
>>This is the escaped output form of bytea. It seems that on linux the
>>perl script is either using a binary cursor, or automagically unescaping
>>the output, while on windows it isn't. I'm not sure why that would
>>happen, but hopefully one of the perl gurus hanging around will chime in.
>>
>>Joe
> 
> 
> OK, I really need a solution to this quite quickly.  It's a simple enough 
> script (posted earlier) so if this is something I cannot do with DBD::Pg on a 
> windows platform I can do it with something else.  If that's the case what's 
> the best thing to do it with?  PHP?  I don't have control of the IIS server 
> they are running this on and I doubt very much they have PHP running on it.
> 
> Is the only way to connect to postgres with ASP via the ODBC driver?  How will 
> that handle the bytea field?

I really have to believe a relatively simple solution exists in perl -- 
I'm just not familiar enough with perl to help. Did you see my post on 
PHP's stripcslashes()? I'd look for the equiv function in perl.

The ASP/ODBC approach will have the same issue because the standard 
output format of bytea is octal escaping for all non-printable characters.

A quick search on google finds:
Data: Numbers  Why isn't my octal data interpreted correctly?
    Perl only understands octal and hex numbers as such when they    occur as literals in your program. If they are
readin from    somewhere and assigned, no automatic conversion takes place.    You must explicitly use oct() or hex()
ifyou want the values    converted. oct() interprets both hex ("0x350") numbers and    octal ones ("0350" or even
withoutthe leading "0", like    "377"), while hex() only converts hexadecimal ones, with or    without a leading "0x",
like"0x255", "3A", "ff", or    "deadbeef".
 
    This problem shows up most often when people try using    chmod(), mkdir(), umask(), or sysopen(), which all want
permissions in octal.
 
        chmod(644,  $file); # WRONG -- perl -w catches this        chmod(0644, $file); # right

So maybe you could replace all single "\" characters (but *not* "\\") 
with "0" and then use oct()?


FWIW, here is the C code for the PHP stripcslashes() function. Maybe you 
can convert this to a perl function and use it.

/* {{{ php_stripcslashes */
PHPAPI void php_stripcslashes(char *str, int *len)
{char *source, *target, *end;int  nlen = *len, i;char numtmp[4];
for (source=str, end=str+nlen, target=str; source<end; source++) {    if (*source == '\\' && source+1<end) {
source++;       switch (*source) {            case 'n': *target++='\n'; nlen--; break;            case 'r':
*target++='\r';nlen--; break;            case 'a': *target++='\a'; nlen--; break;            case 't': *target++='\t';
nlen--;break;            case 'v': *target++='\v'; nlen--; break;            case 'b': *target++='\b'; nlen--; break;
        case 'f': *target++='\f'; nlen--; break;            case '\\': *target++='\\'; nlen--; break;            case
'x':if (source+1<end && isxdigit((int)(*(source+1)))) {                    numtmp[0] = *++source;                    if
(source+1<end&& isxdigit((int)(*(source+1)))) {                        numtmp[1] = *++source;
numtmp[2]= '\0';                        nlen-=3;                    } else {                        numtmp[1] = '\0';
                    nlen-=2;                    }                    *target++=(char)strtol(numtmp, NULL, 16);
         break;                }                /* break is left intentionally */            default: i=0;
 while (source<end && *source>='0' && *source<='7' && i<3) {                    numtmp[i++] = *source++;
}               if (i) {                    numtmp[i]='\0';                    *target++=(char)strtol(numtmp, NULL, 8);
                  nlen-=i;                    source--;                } else {                    *target++=*source;
                nlen--;                }        }    } else {        *target++=*source;    }}
 
if(nlen != 0) {    *target='\0';}
*len = nlen;
}
/* }}} */


HTH,

Joe