Re: Removing whitespace using regexp_replace

Thomas Kellerer  schrieb:

> Hi,
> 
> I have a column with the datatype "text" that may contain leading 
> whitespace (tabs, spaces newlines, ...) and I would like to remove them all 
> (ideally leading and trailing).

You can use trim() for that:

select 'x' || trim(both '\t' from trim(both ' ' from ' \t\tfoo bar  ')) || 'x';

(for testing with 'x' around the result)


> 
> I tried
> 
> SELECT regexp_replace(myfield, '\A\s*', '')
> FROM mytable;

For regexp_replace() you need an extra parameter 'g' like below:

test=*# select 'x' || regexp_replace(regexp_replace(' \t\tfoo bar  ', '^[ \t]+','','g'),'[ \t]+$','','g') || 'x';                                                                                  ^^^               ^^^


Andreas
-- 
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely
unintentional side effect.                              (Linus Torvalds)
"If I was god, I would recompile penguin with --enable-fly."    (unknow)
Kaufbach, Saxony, Germany, Europe.              N 51.05082°, E 13.56889°