[RESOLVED] forward slash not picking up in a WHERE

cretaceous

I have some address data already in database - for example:

12/14 High Road

I now get a new entry from a text file and I want to do compares on existing data
so if 'new' : insert, if not : update

but if I do
SELECT foo FROM table WHERE addressline='12/14 High Road'
I do not get a row returned
the forward slash is not being recognised
(I don't get an error either)

my primitive guess is that my input data is mysql_real_escape_string converted to something like '12\/14 High Road', where the backslash is a mySql magic character - and it fails to match it...
(I'd rather not call it magic as anything like 'magic quotes' is bad news, but it is only a guess)

any ideas how to get round this or point out my error?

there is no addslashes in operation
(this is simplifed explanation - I do more checks than one line of address)

bradgrafelman

A forward slash isn't a "special" character, nor will it ever be escaped for DB operations.

cretaceous

that doesn't explain why it is happening though

johanafm

It works fine for me, using MySQL 5.1.something

CREATE TABLE a (
id INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
txt VARCHAR(20));

INSERT INTO a(txt) VALUES
('12 14 High Road'),
('12/14 High Road'),
('12a14 High Road');

SELECT * FROM a
WHERE txt='12/14 High Road';
-- gives result
id  txt
2  12/14 High Road

Have you tried executing your query directly against the DBMS using CLI?
Have you put your query into an intermediate variable so that you can log the exact same query that you execute?
If the above seems ok, have you tried using prepared statements rather than mysql_real_escape_string, just in case there's a problem with it? I'd doubt it, but still worth trying I suppose.

cretaceous

I think my install of XAMPP is corrupted - I am getting errors in phpMyAdmin where it won't display table content, as well as this forward slash issue
it also does it without mysql_real_escape_string ..
perhaps I should take the big step and do a proper install of Apache...

cretaceous

I'm a cretin - the field character count was one character too small and the entry causing problems was an entire company name, plus street, but it ended with a full stop (full point to n.americans)

and I just didn't notice the full stop was clipped from the record when doing the look up

it's meant to be proper street data (from company's old database) but someone had entered 65 character string -
char count is usually the first thing I check, but that damn forward slash flummoxed me

bradgrafelman

Sounds like you need to enable strict mode on your SQL server so that data which can't fit into a column isn't silently truncated but instead rejected with an error.