MySQL Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Displaying Query Results as Paragraph Text

Problem

You want to display a query result as free text.

Solution

Display it within paragraph tags.

Discussion

Paragraphs are useful for displaying free text with no particular structure. In this case all you need to do is retrieve the text to be displayed, encode it to convert special characters to the corresponding HTML entities, and wrap each paragraph within <p> and </p> tags. The following examples show how to produce paragraphs for a status display that includes the current date and time, the server version, the client username, and the default database name (if any). These values are available from the following query:

mysql>SELECT NOW(), VERSION(), USER(), DATABASE();
+---------------------+------------+------------------+------------+
| NOW()               | VERSION()  | USER()           | DATABASE() |
+---------------------+------------+------------------+------------+
| 2006-10-17 15:47:33 | 5.0.27-log | cbuser@localhost | cookbook   |
+---------------------+------------+------------------+------------+

In Perl, the CGI.pm module provides a p() function that adds paragraph tags around the string you pass to it. p() does not HTML-encode its argument, so you should take care of that by calling escapeHTML():

($now, $version, $user, $db) = $dbh->selectrow_array ("SELECT NOW(), VERSION(), USER(), DATABASE()"); $db = "NONE" unless defined ($db); print p (escapeHTML ("Local time on the MySQL server is $now.")); print p (escapeHTML ("The server version is $version.")); ...