[Zope] Textareas and SQL (Gadfly)

[Evan Gibson]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2000 at 09:25:53AM -0800, Joseph Pallas wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Feb 2000, Evan Gibson wrote:
> 
> > What I _think_ is happening is that gadfly can't handle carriage
> > returns and line feeds in the string input. (Which is why I was trying
> > things like "virtual" to perhaps get rid of them.)
> 
> This is an all-too-frequently asked question.  First, pay no attention to
> people who say it's a bug in gadfly.  The fundamental problem is that
> there is no SQL standard for including linebreaks in strings.  Any
> solution for including the linebreaks that works with one database is
> pretty much guaranteed not to work with another.  You don't want to be
> locked in to using one database (I know: I've been forced to move from
> gadfly so that non-python tools can get to the data).

I'm halfway through moving to oracle, but for the moment I'm still in
gadfly land. One thing I've found _immensely_ useful when working with
gadfly is the gfplus.py script I found while trolling deja. It provides
you with an interactive shell for Gadfly along the lines of sqlplus.
It's at http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/~jeff/gfplus/


But that's changing the topic... Since it's not a bug, but rather a lack
of a standard, then the datbase isn't the right place to fix it. It
shouldn't be left the way it is, though, since it's a big pain for
newbies and pretty hard to debug (for the longest time I thought there
was something wrong with my query. I'd found another place where I did
dmtl instead of dtml and was looking for something similar.)

I think the proper place for a fix would be Zope's typecasting features.
Instead of just ":text" making the output text with linefeeds we could
add ":text_clean" which takes all the text from the textarea and replaces
linefeeds with single spaces, and ":text_html" which converts them to
<br> [like the linefeed_to_br function, but without adding a linefeed
back in after the br!]


> I use a simple whitespace cleaner:
> _.string.join(_.string.split(textfield))

Thanks for that. And thanks to the other guys who helped too.
 
> This is the simplest thing if you don't care about the original linebreaks
> (I warn my users that linebreaks will be ignored).  If your text is
> destined only for HTML and you want to preserve line breaks, you could
> instead use _.string.join(_.string.split(textfield, '\n'), '<BR>').  I
> decided to keep HTML out of my database; you may decide otherwise.

Nod. We need formatting methods to cover both decisions.

> Hope this helps.
> joe

-- 
  Evan ~ThunderFoot~ Gibson    ~ nihil mutatem, omni deletum ~
      May the machines watch over you with loving grace.