Unable to retrieve a BIT column without explicit casting

[Michael Rubin]

Hello and thank you for your time.

I'm trying this on MySQL community 5.6.12 x64 on CentOS release 6.3 (Final).

I'm retrieving a result of a simple query (i.e. "SELECT * FROM MyTable") where one of the columns happens to be of type BIT(1). I noticed that when I cast the resulting row (from a particular MYSQL_ROW) to an std::string, I always get an empty string even when the bit should be a 1. (The length of that field always returns 1.) I tried treating the field as binary and doing something like: char c = *(row); but I still couldn't get a 1.

When I do an explicit cast, like "SELECT *,CAST(MyBitField AS UNSIGNED) AS MyBitField2 FROM MyTable", I get a 1 in my std::string from the additional row[].

Is there any way to get a 0 or 1 from a BIT column without this explicit cast?

Thanks.