Good morning,

This may well be a daft question, but I'm confused and I can't find anything referring to this in the PostgreSQL
or DBI books, bear with me, I'm new.

I have one table containing a respondents contact details, e.g. name, address fields, telephone numbers, etc.
Some of the telephone number cells are blank/ empty. When I query in psql, using
"SELECT telephone from sample" the return shows all columns, including the blanks (as expected).

Using the Perl DBI I try to pull out telephone again and bind the result to a pre-defined variable $telephone.
e.g.

$sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT telephone from sample");
$sth->execute();
$sth->bind_columns(undef, \$telephone);
while ( $sth->fetch ) {
print STDERR "$telephone\n";
}
$sth->finish;

This fails with "Statement has no result to bind(perhaps you need to call execute first)"

This code works fine for a field that is always populated e.g. name in place of telephone in line 1.

Is my code fatally flawed or do I need to deal with the blank cells differently when the data is written to the
database in the beginning, or before the bind. Any help greatly appreciated.

(Running: Linux 7.2, Perl 5.6, Postgres 7.1.3, DBI 1.32.)

Richard

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