What is the most straightforward way to pad empty dates in sql results (on either mysql or perl end)?

Question

I\'m building a quick csv from a mysql table with a query like:

select DATE(date),count(date) from table group by DATE(date) order by date asc;

Answer 1

You could use a DateTime object:

use DateTime;
my $dt;

while ( my ($date, $sum) = $sth->fetchrow )  {
    if (defined $dt) {
        print CSV $dt->ymd . ",0\n" while $dt->add(days => 1)->ymd lt $date;
    }
    else {
        my ($y, $m, $d) = split /-/, $date;
        $dt = DateTime->new(year => $y, month => $m, day => $d);
    }
    print CSV, "$date,$sum\n";
}

What the above code does is it keeps the last printed date stored in a DateTime object $dt, and when the current date is more than one day in the future, it increments $dt by one day (and prints it a line to CSV) until it is the same as the current date.

This way you don't need extra tables, and don't need to fetch all your rows in advance.