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Posted by Tim Streater on 12/18/63 11:48
In article <xvHcg.10455$S.4851@newsfe3-win.ntli.net>,
Oli Filth <catch@olifilth.co.uk> wrote:
> Tim Streater said the following on 23/05/2006 17:49:
> > I have some items, numbered from 0 upwards. Some of them may have a
> > string attached. All these items need to be represented in a single
> > already existing database record. So, I thought of taking an array, as
> > it might be looking thus (the values are all strings):
> >
> > Key Value
> > --- -----
> > 0 firstone
> > 2 somestring
> > 5 anotherstr
> >
> >
> > and so on, and converting it to a single string:
> >
> > "'0', 'firstone', '2', 'somestring', '5', 'anotherstr'"
> >
> > then I have a string I can write to the database record.
> >
>
> Is it absolutely mandatory that you put these into a single record?
> This is almost certainly a bad idea. Not only do you have to write
> conversion functions to get data into and out of the database, but you
> data is no longer atomic. Amongst other things, this makes it difficult
> to search, index, delete or reference your data...
Oli,
Thanks for pushing me to re-think my strategy. Choosing a good data
representation is most of the battle and while driving home and back to
work this morning [1] I had a think about better ways to represent the
data which would retain the flexibility while not burdening the general
and presentation suite. Generally I don't like hacks anyway as they tend
to come back to bite you.
Thanks to the other responders - there are many functions in PHP I am
not familiar with so being pointed at some new ones for a specific
purpose will be a good exercise.
[1] Radio 4 only had an unfunny comedy program last night and a poor
magazine program this morning, as it happened, so I turned the radio off
while driving.
Cheers,
-- tim
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