Re: select NULL||'abc' returns empty string (or NULL)

On Wed, 2002-02-27 at 11:25, Holger Marzen wrote:
> I suppose that PostgreSQL insists that a NULL value cannot be
> concatenated with a string. Can I cast this somehow? I noticed that
> feature when I did a
>
> select * from tab where col1||col2 ilike '%bla%'
>
> and it did't find rows where one of the columns was NULL. Any ideas for
> workarounds?

Use COALESCE():
select * from tab where coalesce(col1,'') | coalesce(col2,'') ilike
'%bla%'

--
Oliver Elphick                                Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight                              http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
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