At work our project is indented with 2 spaces. Somehow they don't want to use tabs for indenting.
I personally can't read code indented with 2 spaces very well and would prefer 4 spaces.
Is there anything I can do without changing the code, to improve the readability for me?
Thanks four your answers!
No.
A tab is something that can be openly and freely defined to be as many spaces as you want it to be, such that one tab could equal 3 spaces if you really wanted to (although I think both factions would be justified in their outrage over such an abomination).
A space is a hard-coded, explicitly defined value, and if two spaces are used, then it can only ever be two spaces.
Your only hope is to advocate - strongly advocate - for better code standards. You'll have to either extol the benefits of tabs since they can be used for variable space, or you'll have to demonstrate why having four spaces is preferable to two for readability's sake.
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I have to create sql function that converts special Characters, International Characters(French, Chinese...) to english.
Is there any special function in sql, can i get??
Thanks for your help.
If you are after English names for the characters, that is an achievable goal, as they all have published names as part of the Unicode standard.
See for example:
http://www.unicode.org/ucd/
http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/
Your task then is to simply turn the list of unicode characters into a table with 100,000 or so rows. Unfortunately the names you get will be things like ARABIC LIGATURE LAM WITH MEEM MEDIAL FORM.
On the other hand, if you want to actually translate the meaning, you need to be looking at machine translation software. Both Microsoft and Google have well-known cloud translation offerings and there are several other well-thought of products too.
I think the short answer is you can't unless you narrow your requirements a lot. It seems you want to take a text sample, A, and convert it into romanized text B.
There are a few problems to tackle:
Languages are typically not romanized on a single character basis. The correct pronunciation of a character is often dependent on the characters and words around it, and can even have special rules for just one word (learning English can be tough because it is filled with these, having borrowed words from many languages without normalizing the spelling).
Even if you code rules for every language you want to support you still have homographs, words that are spelled using exactly the same characters, but that have different pronunciations (and thus romanization) depending on what was meant - for example "sow" meaning a pig, or "sow" (where the w is silent) meaning to plant seeds.
And then you get into the problem of what language you are romanizing: Characters and even words are not unique to one language, but the actual meaning and romanization can vary. The fact that many languages include loan words from those language they share characters with complicates any attempt to automatically determine which language you are trying to romanize.
Given all these difficulties, what it is you actually want to achieve (what problem are you solving)?
You mention French among the languages you want to "convert" into English - yet French (with its accented characters) is already written in the roman alphabet. Even everyday words used in English occasionally make use of accented characters, though these are rare enough that the meaning and pronunciation is understood even if they are omitted (ex. résumé).
Is your problem really that you can't store unicode/extended ASCII? There are numerous ways to correct or work around that.
I have noticed that using either Oracle or SQLite, queries like this are perfectly valid
SELECT*FROM(SELECT a,MAX(b)i FROM c GROUP BY a)WHERE(a=1)OR(i=2);
Is that a “feature” of SQL that keywords or words of a query need not be surrounded with whitespace? If so, why was it designed this way? SQL has been designed to be readable, this seems to be a form of obfuscation (particularly the MAX(b)i thing where i is a token which serves as an alias).
SQL-92 BNF Grammar here explicitly states that delimiters (bracket, whitespace, * etc) are valid to break up the tokens, which makes the white space optional in various cases where other delimiters already break up the tokens.
This is true not only for SQLite and Oracle, but MySQL and SQL Server at least (that I work with and have tested), since it is specified in the language definition.
Whitespace is optional in pretty much any language where it is not absolutely necessary to preserve boundaries between keywords and/or identifiers. You could write code in C# that looked similar to your SQL, and as long as the compiler can still parse the identifiers and keywords, it doesn't care.
Case in point: The subquery of your statement is the only place where whitespace is needed to separate keywords from other alpha characters. Everywhere else, some non-alphanumeric character (which aren't part of any keyword in SQL) separates keywords, so the SQL parser can still digest this statement. As long as that is true, whitespace is purely for human readability.
Most of this is valid simply because you've enclosed key sections in parentheses where white space would ordinarily be required.
I think this is a side effect of the parser.
Usually the compilers will ignore white spaces via blocks SKIP, which are tokens ignored by the compiler but that cause errors if in the middle of a reserved word. For example in C: 'while' is valid, 'whi le' is not although the whitespace is a SKIP token.
The reason is that it simplifies the parser, if not they would have to manage all the white space and that can be quite complex unless you set strict rules like Python does, but that would be both hard to impose to vendors like Oracle and would make SQL more complex than it should.
And that simplification has the (unintended?) side effect of being able to remove MOST (not all) white spaces. Be aware in some cases the removal of white spaces may cause compilation errors (can't remove the space in GROUP BY as that's part of the token).
In one of my project, it was required to have a table with space in between. Some suggest me not to include spaces because it is not a good technique.
we can still implement it using single-double quotes for table name in queries. But i need a solid backing for not opting spaces. Please help.
It makes it harder to read, creates complexity if you ever want to do dynamic SQL. Spaces in the tables names on the other hand add no value whatsoever.
Mr. Anderson points out that its tedious. This is true enough, but more importantly it adds unnecessary tediousness.
I would never use spaces (nor other special characters) in table or column names.
Out of lazyness is one point (so typing SQL queries is a lot easier because you don't need those dreaded quotes)
Secondly a lot of tools out there might still have problems with non-standard table names.
Btw: the quote character for non-standard object names is a double quote (")
If you really go down that road, I would highly recommend to put MySQL into "ANSI Mode" in order to be compatible with the rest of the (DBMS) world.
(Single quotes are for character literals, double quotes for "escaping" non-standard names)
We're working on revising the url structure for some of our movie content, but we aren't quite sure on the best way to handle odd characters. For example,
'303/302'
'8 1/2 Women'
'Dude, Where's My Car?'
'9-1/2 Weeks'
So far, we're thinking:
/movies/303-302
/movies/8-1-2-women
/movies/dude-wheres-my-car
/movies/9-1-2-weeks
Is this the best solution? Is there anything we're forgetting?
Use this format: /movies/123456/8-1-2-women
Set up your web server so that movies are identified by the numeric id (123456), and the rest of the path is ignored (only serves for SEO).
(Stackoverflow uses this approach)
We always use dashes.
I don't have a source off hand, but I have heard that the dash character is good for SEO purposes, better so than something like camel caps (i.e. dudeWheresMyCar) but not sure how it compares to underscores, ampersands, or percentage signs. Apparently with dashes (and maybe other separation characters too) search bots can "read" the links and add it as just one more factor on determining content relevance.
From Seomoz: "When creating URLs with multiple words in the format of a phrase, hyphens are best to separate the terms (e.g. /brands/dolce-and-gabbana/), followed (in order) by, underscores (_), pluses (+) and nothing."
This has been confirmed by Matt Cutts, Google too.
I'm working on a search module that searches in text columns that contains html code. The queries are constructed like: WHERE htmlcolumn LIKE '% searchterm %';
Default the modules searches with spaces at both end of the searchterms, with wildcards at the beginning and/or the end of the searchterms these spaces are removed (*searchterm -> LIKE '%searchterm %'; Also i've added the possibility to exclude results with certain words (-searchterm -> NOT LIKE '% searchterm %'). So far so good.
The problem is that words that that are preceded by an html-tag are not found (<br/>searchterm is not found when searching on LIKE '% searchterm.., also words that come after a comma or end with a period etc.).
What i would like to do is search for words that are not preceded or followed by the characters A-Z and a-z. Every other characters are ok.
Any ideas how i should achieve this? Thanks!
Look into MySQLs fulltextsearch, it might be able to use non-letter characters as delimiters. It will alsow be much much faster than a %term% search since that requires a full table-scan.
You could use a regular expression: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/regexp.html
Generally speaking, it is better to use full text search facilities, but if you really want a small SQL, here it is:
SELECT * FROM `t` WHERE `htmlcolumn` REGEXP '[[:<:]]term[[:>:]]'
It returns all records that contain word 'term' whether it is surrounded with spaces, punctuation, special characters etc
I don't think SQL's "LIKE" operator alone is the right tool for the job you are trying to do. Consider using Lucene, or something like it. I was able to integrate Lucene.NET into my application in a couple days. You'll spend more time than that trying to salvage your current approach.
If you have no choice but to make your current approach work, then consider storing the text in two columns in your database. The first column is for the pure text, with punctuation etc. The second column is the text that has been pre-preprocessed, just words, no punctuation, normalized so as to be easier for your "LIKE" approach.