Thread

Doug Smith <doug@the-bridge.net> — 1998-10-17T02:58:51Z

Why is that I can only cat two variables in a select statement.
ex. select lastname||' '||firstname||' '||address
Delivers an parseing error at "||". When trying 
ex. select lastnamae||firstname 
It works fine.
What's up?
Doug...

Re: your mail

Bruce Momjian <maillist@candle.pha.pa.us> — 1998-10-18T03:37:44Z

[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> Why is that I can only cat two variables in a select statement.
> ex. select lastname||' '||firstname||' '||address
> Delivers an parseing error at "||". When trying 
> ex. select lastnamae||firstname 
> It works fine.
> What's up?
> Doug...

It is a know problem on the TODO list.  We don't have a fix for 6.4 yet,
and at this point, it would have to be in a post-6.4 release.  If
someone wants to take it on, go ahead.  It is a parser problem.


-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
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RE:

Taral <taral@mail.utexas.edu> — 1998-10-18T04:30:09Z

> ex. select lastname||' '||firstname||' '||address

It's because the parser has no defined precedence for operators like ||.

Try:

select (((lastname || ' ') || firstname) || ' ') || address;

Yes, I know it's annoying. But there's a problem with defining precedence in
the grammar for operators like this. Sorry.

Taral

Re:

James Oden <joden@lee.k12.nc.us> — 1998-10-19T14:41:46Z

>  Why is that I can only cat two variables in a select statement.ex.
> select lastname||' '||firstname||' '||address
> Delivers an parseing error at "||". When tryingex. select
> lastnamae||firstnameIt works fine.What's up?
>
> Doug...


Hi Doug,

The || operator operates more like a functiion than an operator.  What I
mean by that is that, as you have surmised, it takes two and only two
arguments.  This does not mean that you cannot concatenate more than two
strings...you just need to use parenthesis in the proper way.  Your
query would become:

   select ((((lastname||' ')||firstname)||' ')||address

Of course you would need the rest of your query (I assume that was just
the half that was giving you trouble).

Hope this helps...james