Re: Converting empty input strings to Nulls

Hi Ken-

Have you looked at encode ?
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/functions-string.html

Anyone else?
Martin
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Winter" <ken(at)sunward(dot)org>
To: "PostgreSQL pg-general List" <pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2008 1:40 PM
Subject: [GENERAL] Converting empty input strings to Nulls

Applications accessing my PostgreSQL 8.0 database like to submit no-value
date column values as empty strings rather than as Nulls. This, of course,
causes this PG error:

SQL State: 22007
ERROR: invalid input syntax for type date: ""

I'm looking for a way to trap this bad input at the database level, quietly
convert the input empty strings to Null, and store the Null in the date
column. I tried a BEFORE INSERT OR UPDATE trigger evoking this function ...

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION "public"."empty_string_to_null"()
RETURNS trigger AS
$BODY$
BEGIN
IF CAST(NEW.birth_date AS text) = '' THEN
NEW.birth_date = Null;
END IF;
RETURN NEW;
END;
$BODY$
LANGUAGE 'plpgsql' VOLATILE;

.. but an empty string still evokes the error even before this function is
triggered.

Is there a way to convert empty strings to Nulls before the error is evoked?

~ TIA
~ Ken