Unexpected output from APSW interactive shell

[ColMcp]

I ran a short Python script using apsw to populate a Sqlite database from a utf-8 encoded file of SQL statements. When I use the apsw interactive shell to select a particular item from a table it shows O Boto (B{LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH CIRCUMFLEX}to). When I use macOS's default sqlite3 shell to do the same selection I get O Boto (Bôto) (which is what I expected).

I recognise the text in the curly braces to be the Unicode name of the ô but what is it doing there?

[rogerbinns]

It is an intentional difference in functionality when the shell is outputting a formatted query results table. If you look in the example you can see different options for how strings are sanitized - the parameter is described here. (The SQLite shell is generally happy to just dump whatever bytes it got as text straight out.)

If the apsw shell is started interactively (ie running with terminal input and output) then it defaults to mode box. There is also qbox where quoting values is turned on, and table which uses ASCII.

You can change the options with flags named like format_query_table parameters:

.mode box --string-sanitize 0 --truncate 17 --text_with 132

There is currently a bug showing help (eg .mode box --help) That will be in the next release (in the next few weeks).

Separately from that I have been adding comprehensive FTS5 support to APSW which is also in the next release That forced me to implement a whole bunch of Unicode stuff such as text segmentation and line breaking, in addition to an up to date Unicode database because I needed information unicodedata doesn't have. That let me fix text widths in the console and line breaking in the table. It handles everything Unicode can handle.

[ColMcp]

Thank you so much for the comprehensive reply, and for all the work you have put into apsw over the years!

[rogerbinns]

The bug was only showing the help/errors for the mode - the flags do work. I'm glad you enjoy apsw. The FTS5 stuff is really good, even if I do say so myself.