Re: [cx-oracle-users] Nulls returned as None and not as as "empty or zero lenght string"

[Mihai I. <mi...@re...>]

On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 07:15:23AM -0700, Chris Dunscombe wrote:
> All,
> 
> Is there anyway that Null values returned from a query can be an "empty or zero length string"
> instead of None?
> 
> This may seem a strange request as it's easy to use type to test if a null has been returned as
> None. However I've a performance critical app where I need to output "nothing" (zero length /
> empty string) if the value is null. Hence at present I have to perform this "type test" on ALL
> columns that don't have a "Not Null" constraint in the database which is quite an overhead when in
> some cases I need to do it millions and sometimes billions of times.

You don't have to test with type.

if val is None:
    val = ''

Or, if val is always a string or None:
val or ''

will always return a string (empty string if object is None).

Null objects are very well represented as None. Empty strings being
represented as Null in Oracle is the weird part here, and I don't think it's
something cx_Oracle (or any database libarries for that matter) should try to
fix.

Hope this helps.
Misa