Re: How to convert array to string, and vice versa

In article <xvHcg.10455$S.4851@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Oli Filth <catch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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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