Posts in category Code

Finding international characters with MySQL

Aug19
2009 Written by Jon Dowdle

I recently had to find the rows in a database that contained any multibyte characters. My first thought was to leverage the difference between length() and char_length(). The query would be similiar to this:

Select pKey, dataCol
From myTable
Where length(dataCol) != char_length(dataCol)

To my surprise this query didn't work. After mulling it over in my mind, I tried a few debugging statements such as:

Select pKey,
  dataCol,
  length(dataCol),
  char_length(dataCol)
From myTable

That only reaffirmed that all return values of the char_length() were equal to the length() results.

Then it hit me, I (or rather the database) was using the latin1 character set. So I quickly cast the data into utf8 and it worked! Below is the resulting query.

Select pKey, dataCol
From myTable
Where length( cast(dataCol using utf8) ) !=
        char_length( cast(dataCol using utf8) )
Posted in MySQL - Tagged ,

Transforming Coldfusion code with XSLT

May16
2009 Written by Jon Dowdle

Note: For those looking for something useful, you won't find it in this post.

For a little Saturday fun, I set out to transform Coldfusion code using XSLT. It didn't take long before I ran into some issues.

The first problem I ran into was that most Coldfusion code doesn't have a root element (not to mention it isn't well formed XML in any sense).  You might be thinking "Well CFCs have a root node" and you'd be right. So I tried to transform a really simple CFC and I was somewhat successful.

The only caveat is that the use of a few almost all tags won't work. For example, <cfreturn foo /> isn't proper XML and Saxon complains. So at this point, this is pretty much a worthless exercise (see note above). Either way I ended up with something that did work (in the functional sense, not the useful sense). See the code below if you're interested in what the XSLT looks like.

XSLT Coldfusion

Very Simple CFC

Transformed Output

Tagged ,
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