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[Bug]: Cannot view string containing ASCII Unit Separator CHAR(31) as text #4193
Closed as not planned
Description
What did you do?
select "John"|| CHAR(31) || "Mary";
What did you expect to see?
What did you see instead?
There does not seem to be a way to force display of the value. Whilst field stuffing is not recommended for relational databases in this case I'm using SQLite as an interim store (and records must be visible to the human eye) before being transformed to parquet. Whilst I could store multi-value columns as JSON it significantly slows the ingestion pipeline compared with a delimited string.
I tried many other combinations of delimiter, but the only one that's not present in the source data is CHAR(31) and given it's the ASCII Unit Separator, I thought it most approptiate to use,
DB4S Version
3.13.1
What OS are you seeing the problem on?
Linux
OS version
Arch Linux
Relevant log output
N/APrevention against duplicate issues
- I have searched for similar issues
Activity
mgrojo commentedon Oct 22, 2026
Hi @audiomuze. Chr(31) is a control character, not a printable character, so it doesn't make sense to display it as text. As alternative, you can use the hexadecimal editor, which contains a text display for ASCII printable characters (non-printable charactes are shown as
.:If you want the value to be displayed in the table browser, you can use a display format:
But in that case, you want be able to update the field from the browser; you'll have to use SQL sentences.
Sorry, but I don't see a reason to treat this control character different to any other that is not printable, so I'll close this as "won't fix". Feel free to answer, the conversation won't be blocked.