Is there any LTRIM function for MS ACCESS 2007? - sql

Question

i am trying to ltrim 3 or 4 zeros from a column in Access 2007 but not getting any result where the data-type is text(from a csv data).

Answer 1

From what I read, MS Access in fact should support LTRIM. Here is a workaround in case you need it:
SELECT
IIF(string LIKE "0000*",
MID(string, 5),
IIF(string LIKE "000*", MID(string, 4), string)) output
FROM yourTable;

Answer 2

Here are a couple of quickly written LTrim & RTrim functions to operate with characters other than spaces:
Function LTrimChr(strStr As String, strChr As String) As String
If strStr Like strChr & "*" Then
LTrimChr = LTrimChr(Mid(strStr, 2), strChr)
Else
LTrimChr = strStr
End If
End Function
Function RTrimChr(strStr As String, strChr As String) As String
If strStr Like "*" & strChr Then
RTrimChr = RTrimChr(Left(strStr, Len(strStr) - 1), strChr)
Else
RTrimChr = strStr
End If
End Function
Expects the strChr to be a single character, e.g.:
?LTrimChr("000123456789000","0")
123456789000
?RTrimChr("000123456789000","0")
000123456789

Answer 3

In case of digits only, you can use Val to strip leading zeroes:
LTrimmedValue = CStr(Val(Value))
' "000123456789000" -> "123456789000"

Answer 4

MS Access supports ltrim(), but only for spaces. So, assuming that your string has no spaces, you can use replace() and ltrim():
select replace(ltrim(replace(col, '0', ' ')), ' ', '0')
If you do have spaces, there is often a character you don't have, so you can replace the spaces first:
select replace(replace(ltrim(replace(replace(col, ' ', '~'
), '0', ' '
)
), ' ', '0'
), '~', ' '
)