Array, Array, who has got the array?

[Mark Brownell]

On Sunday, February 29, 2004, at 09:19  PM, hershrev wrote:

> Hello,
> And if I'd like to use an array as a table field getting a SQL into an 
> array ?I'll try to be a bit more specific .
> In a table field if you get a sql
> 	      company	first_name	last_name
> line 1     run rev		john			smith
> line 2	  		hersh		rev
> ok, what happened over here is that on the second line the company 
> column is empty but the first name (hersh) is still the second item. 
> And then I'd like to , with a repeat to put item by item into fields.
> Thanks.

I've been working on naming conventions for a simple XML construct 
where the names are directly relational to row/column coordinates. 
Extraction of a specific row/column could be by pull parser. Since 
there is only one data chunk that exists in the entire simple XML 
document my advice is to use a pull parser. There are different ways to 
get your data if you want to. I prefer the direct approach.

Example: <r1c1>your data here</r1c1> where r = row and c = column.

So like the simple XML your array keys can be r1c1 for company, r1c2 
for first_name, and r1c3 for last_name. You can then add new lines by 
using keys that are r2c1, r2c2, and r2c3.

So you could use an assembly scheme to create proper keys to extract 
data from your array.
Example:
put 1 into rowX
put 1 into columnX
put "r" & rowX & "c" & columnX into thisKey
put myArray[thisKey] into line1Company

...or you could create pull parser tags sets like:
  "<" & thisKey & ">" and "</" & thisKey & ">"

I have commented on pull parsers in past topics. See PNLP in the list 
archives. I mentioned the simple XML here because tag set schema and 
array keys work well together. In a way they both point to containers. 
I use my own pull parsers because sometimes my data is multi-lined 
HTMLText. This would not work well with most XML parsers.

Mark