FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From: Chris Hernandez [mailto:christian AT unsw.edu.au]
> Sent: September 18, 2002 4:57 AM
> 
> I've recently upgraded my FreeTDS to version 0.60 and now 
> find that when I
> run a SELECT query from PHP, the reply now comes back padded 
> with spaces
> to the length of the field on the database. This did not happen
> previously.

Chris, 

I think we carefully fixed a bug you were using.  Thanks for pointing this
out.  I'm sorry you weren't alerted to the new behavior; it should have been
in the release notes.  

A lot of work went into datatypes and type conversion in 0.60, and part of
it was assessing what we were doing with character types and their
terminators.  ISTR we had been -- incorrectly -- null-terminating
char/varchar fields in many cases.  This was corrected, and to the best of
my knowledge FreeTDS now conforms on this score to the vendors'
documentation.  

It may nevertheless be that we are doing something wrong.  The dblib
dbbind() documentation states that char/varchar fields will be blank padded
for CHARBIND and STRINGBIND bindings, but will be null-terminated for
NTBSTRINGBIND.  I am not positive we tested our NTBSTRINGBIND behavior in
this regard, nor do I know what PHP uses.  I will double-check our dblib
behavior for you when I get a chance.  

Which API did you configure PHP to use, please?  It could easily be an error
in one or another client library.  

If we're indeed following the vendors' specification, we cannot restore the
previous behavior.  To do so would interfere with our progress toward
handling multibyte character sets and binary compatibility.  

Unless we find an error in our implementation, I think your best bet is to
trim your data with SQL, or patch PHP to use NTBSTRINGBIND.  

Regards, 

--jkl


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