Re: extra spaces

On 15 Dec 2000, Roland Roberts wrote:

> >>>>> "Soma" == Soma Interesting <dfunct@telus.net> writes:
>
>     Soma> All values called from the database are still padded with
>     Soma> extra spaces from the column size in the database. Is this
>     Soma> normal - I don't remember this happening when I was using
>     Soma> MySQL. I thought usually the database stripped the extra
>     Soma> spaces when it retrieved the values.
>
> I guess I missed the orginal post about the problem, but...
>
> Are your columns char() or varchar()?  The former is padded in
> PostgreSQL but not MySQL.  The latter is what you really want.

According to "Postgres: Introduction and Concepts", varchar is slower
than char. So if you (like me) want to use char and get rid of the
padding spaces, you may use a regex replacement, as in

        while (@row=$result->fetchrow)
            {
                $row[0] =~ s/[\s]+$//;
            }

in perl, or

$array["name"]=preg_replace("'[\s]+$'", "", $array["name"], -1);

in PHP.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[@]protecne.cl>)