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<p class="MsoNormal">Hi All,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I just knew this non printing character stuff was going to come back and bite me…<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I can identify the rows with non printing characters excluding \t, \r and \n.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Now I need to find which characters are being objected to on each row. I may need to know their position as well.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The data in question is a long varchar. But (fortunately) the longest item is under 12000 characters, so we are under the 32000 char varchar conversion limit.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The easiest way I can think of doing this is to do it in a database procedure…<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New"">create procedure identify_bad_char<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New"">as declare<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> snapshot_id integer4 not null not default;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> res_note long varchar not null not default;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> msgid integer4 not null not default;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> msg varchar(256) not null not default;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New"">begin<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> msgid = 0;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> FOR SELECT snapshot_id, res_note INTO :snapshot_id, :res_note<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> FROM basket_snapshot<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> WHERE res_note SIMILAR TO '%[^' + x'09' + x'0a' + x'0d' + '[:print:]]%'<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> DO<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> msgid = msgid + 1;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> msg = 'res_note for snapshot_id = ' + varchar(:snapshot_id) + ' is dodgy.';<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> message :msgid :msg;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> /* Insert manic while loop here and process the line character by character */<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> ENDFOR;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New"">end;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Before I start coding up the manic while loop … does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can do this more efficiently.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The data was probably added to a web form via a cut and paste from a word document, so we’ve picked up things like smart quotes. Hence we may ultimately be interested in replacing multi character sequences with simple ansi equivalents.
I have a suspicion a clean() function is galloping in my direction.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin Bowes<span style="font-family:"Courier New""><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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