Re: URLs at Google Groups - was Re: Nullology of empty strings

Jonathan Leffler <jleffler_at_earthlink.net> wrote in message news:<3F2B4298.1080706_at_earthlink.net>...
> andrewst wrote:
>
> > Originally posted by Steve Kass
> >
> >>Theory and the ANSI/ISO standards, as far as I know, both
> >>make a clear distinction between the known value '' and the
> >>value NULL, which often makes best sense to think of as meaning
> >>UNKNOWN.
> >>
> >>If you want to know why the designers of Oracle made this choice,
> >>you might post the question in an Oracle newsgroup.
> >
> > This was already discussed in the Oracle group a while ago. We fell
> > into 2 camps: those who understand the difference between '' and NULL
> > and wished Oracle would too, and those who think whatever Oracle
> > provides is The Truth, and that such distinction is therefore
> > meaningless!
> >
> > This link should get you there:
> >
> > http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=3EEB5719.5-
> > 96F0280%40exxesolutions.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dtony%2Bansi%2Bzer-
> > o-length%2Bstring%2Bgroup:comp.databases.oracle.*%2Bgroup:comp.database-
> > s.oracle.*%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26group%3Dcomp.databases.orac-
> > le.*%26selm%3D3EEB5719.596F0280%2540exxesolutions.com%26rnum%3D1
>
>
> That URL got wrapped horribly, of course.
>
> However, I've found by dint of experimentation on previous occasions
> that you only need to specify the 'threadm' or 'selm' parts of the URL
> data - which is usually short enough to fit on one line:
>
>
> http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?threadm=3EEB5719.596F0280%40exxesolutions.com
>
> http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?selm=3EEB5719.596F0280%40exxesolutions.com
>
> The reference is the message ID of a message in the thread.
>
> In the example above, I had to remove "-\n> " from the threadm entry,
> and I mapped "%3d" to "=" and replaced the "%25" in "%2540" with just
> "%". But if you've just cut and pasted the URL from a Google search,
> you should not have to mess with the mappings as much - just delete
> the extraneous material.
>
> I haven't tried with cross-posted messages and the like, so there's a
> chance that other parts help choosing threads in the correct group(s),
> but the shorter URL is generally beneficial.

Or this, http://tinyurl.com/ivzj

Very useful for posting long URL's

Matt Received on Sun Aug 03 2003 - 12:19:59 CEST