ingres empty string becomes garbage

[nyanko]

hello! 🙂

i am using php with ingres ii (not my choice). we recently moved our site to a new server, and now whenever there is a field in ingres that is an empty string, printing it in php results in bits of garbage text such as letters mixed in with accent marks and other ascii symbols.

the database sees the empty strings as such and will match those fields with ''. but when i call ingres_fetch_array() and then output the empty string, i get garbage.

everything else is working fine, and this never happened before. any ideas?

[bastien]

try concatenating an emptry string to those fields, it will return an empty field instead of null

select (''||fieldname) from...

[nyanko]

sorry, i'm not sure what you meant, but i tried it and it didn't work. we did, however, get it working correctly again. unfortunately a bunch of stuff was changed so we can't pinpoint the problem. it was something in php.ini, and one likely suspect was the magic quotes setting. we upgraded php and one of our guys was messing with magic quotes. silly rabbit. anyway, thanks.

[bastien]

maybe its time for rabbit stew