Plang Trick: Database Selection Made Easy

This post dives into Plang, an intent-based programming language that interprets natural language. For more, visit plang.is or get started here.

When you get data from a database in Plang, it always comes as a list—even if you’re only selecting one row using a primary key. That means if the database returns just one result, it’s still treated as a list with one item.

Basic Example: Getting a User

If you want to grab a user’s ID and name, you would normally do this:

Database
- select id, name from users where %userId%, write to %users%
- write out "Name of user: %users[0].name% and id: %users[0].id%"

Since %users% is a list, you have to access the first item using %users[0]%.

Shortcut: Directly Using Variables

Instead of dealing with a list, you can tell Plang to return just one row and automatically store the values into variables.

Database
- select id, name from users where %userId%, return 1
- write out "Name of user: %name% and id: %id%"

Plang will detect which columns you're selecting and create variables for them, making your code cleaner and easier to read.

Custom Variable Names

You can also rename the columns while selecting:

Database
- select id as userId, name as fullName from users where %userId%, return 1
- write out "Name of user: %fullName% and id: %userId%"

Now, instead of using %id% and %name%, you can refer to them as %userId% and %fullName%—whatever makes sense for your code.

Why This Trick is Useful

• No need to handle lists when dealing with single rows.
• Makes your code shorter and cleaner.
• Lets you use custom variable names for better readability.

A nice little trick to make database queries in Plang way simpler! 🚀