Looping through a small database

[Smolin]

I'm pretty new to building in NWNX: I've been maintaining a few systems on our PW, but this is the first project that I've really begun from scratch. I've gotten a lot farther than I thought I'd be able to, but have gotten stymied on a small problem with apostrophes.

My database tracks about 17 deities & their number of worshippers. I need to loop through the data, entry by entry, and retrieve the number of worshippers for each deity. (Deities on rows, worshippers on columns)

I got it working... mostly. It returns the names and values for the first 8 or 9 deities in my database, but it gets hung up when it hits a name with an apostrophe.

I'm sure there's a way to use SQLEncodeSpecialCharacters() to fix it, but I'm not smart enough.

Here's what I have so far:

[Acrodania]

Apostrophes are BAD in SQL databases. Easiest way is to use another character, like a reverse apostrophe, instead.

[Smolin]

Thanks Acrodania. I think I'll just do that.

I tried encoding/decoding the names, but that didn't let me get data from the table, e.g. name in table was S'ierhan, but the input value would have been S~ierhan, so no match was found.

While it's a bit of a hassle to retroactively change few deity names in my mod & server vault, but it seems like that's the best option. I'll set something up in the OnClientEnter event to change the deity field for the players who chose them.

Ironically, only our evil deities have apostrophes in their names.

[Asmodae]

We use a bit different system for dealing with this. I didn't like encode/decode special characters since it loops, and that's never good for performance. Basically we wrap strings with double quotes instead of single quotes, so the single quote becomes part of the string. Haven't had any issues with it yet.

To do this requires some trickery:

Open your mod in the toolset and place down a placeable object. If you have a utility area that noone enters that's great use it, if not a waypoint or something invisible will work. Give it a unique name, and go to the variables properties tab. Add a string and give that string a value of one individual double quote character. Name the variable something like "quote".

Now make a function in your SQL library called GetQuote() (or shorter if you prefer).

[Smolin]

Wow. That's a really neat trick! Thanks!