Is there any kind of non text interface to MySQL?

Question

I have a MySQL query that returns a result with a single column of integers. Is there any way to get the MySQL C API to transfer this as actually integers rather than as ASCII text? For that matter is there a way to get MySQL to do /any/ of the API stuff as other than ASCII text. I'm thinking this would save a bit of time in sprintf/sscanf or whatever else is used as well as in bandwidth.

Answer 1

You're probably out of luck, to be honest. Looking at the MySQL C API (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-fetch-row.html, http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/c-api-datatypes.html, look at MYSQL_ROW) there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for returning data in its actual type... the joys of using structs I guess.

You could always implement a wrapper which checks against the MYSQL_ROW's type attribute (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/c-api-datatypes.html) and returns a C union, but that's probably poor advice; don't do that.