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.

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]%.

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.

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.

• 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! 🚀