URLs at Google Groups - was Re: Nullology of empty strings
Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2003 04:45:51 GMT
Message-ID: <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.
-- Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h> Email: jleffler_at_earthlink.net, jleffler_at_us.ibm.com Guardian of DBD::Informix v2003.04 -- http://dbi.perl.org/Received on Sat Aug 02 2003 - 06:45:51 CEST