>Absolutely! A bug in that it defines a useless distinction that would
>forever be a nuisance for every database developer! :-)
>
>Jonathan Neve.
>
>
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Nope, sorry, I disagree. I write software that interfaces to a variety of
hardware, using Delphi. The protocols (like the ISO 8583 protocol for EFT)
are bitmapped fields - in other words, there is an array of bits that
indicate the presence or absence of fields in the protocol string. I often
store what is sent and what is received in DB tables.

An empty string is (IIRC) ASCII 20. A NUL is ASCII something else.

God help you if you get it wrong ... you'll have users chasing you with
axes all over the continent of your choice ...

Nope, in a real, practical application, '' and NUL mean two very different
things, whether you're using SQL or not.

Regards

Tim


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