Can anyone help me to remove empty spaces from the beginning of a string. In a column, there are different number of empty spaces in each entry. How to eliminate them? Thanks a ton in advance
If you wanted to remove the empty spaces from the beginning of a string,Use LTRIM.
SELECT LTRIM(YourColumn)
FROM YourTable
if you wanted to remove all the spaces,use the below script (specific to SQL server).
SELECT LTRIM(RTRIM(REPLACE(YourColumn,' ','')))
FROM YourTable
Use LTRIM or TRIM depending on your database/version.
Related
I have a varchar column, and each field contains a single word, but there are random number of pipe character before and after the word.
Something like this:
MyVarcharColumn
'|||Apple|||||'
'|||||Pear|||||'
'||Leaf|'
When I query the table, I wish to replace the multiple pipes to a single one, so the result would be like this:
MyVarcharColumn
'|Apple|'
'|Pear|'
'|Leaf|'
Cannot figure out how to solve it with REPLACE function, anybody knows?
vkp's method absolutely solves your issue. Another method that works, and also will work in a variety of other situations, is using a triple REPLACE()
SELECT REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE('|||Apple|||||', '|', '><'), '<>',''), '><','|')
This method will allow you to keep a delimiter between multiple strings where Mr. VPK's method will concat the strings and put a delim at the very beginning and the very end.
SELECT REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE('|||Apple|||||Banana||||||||||', '|', '><'), '<>',''), '><','|')
One way is to replace all the | with blanks and add a pipe character at the beginning and the end of string.
select '|'+replace(mycolumn,'|','')+'|' from tablename
I'm putting the following in my SQL select statement to concatenate text strings (which are not fields in the database) with a couple database fields and I'm getting spaces where I try to use the to_char function to add leading zeros to a couple fields.
Running:
SELECT 'EP.'||TO_CHAR(PWROTPR_TRANSX_NBR,'0000000')||'.'||TO_CHAR(PWROTPR_SUBMIT_COUNTER,'00') as ATS_NBR
Yields:
EP. 0017092. 01
How to I eliminate the unnecessary spaces?
Try using replace function:
SELECT replace(('EP.'||TO_CHAR(PWROTPR_TRANSX_NBR,'0000000')||'.'||TO_CHAR(PWROTPR_SUBMIT_COUNTER,'00')), ' ', '') as ATS_NBR
I'm trying to select some rows from an Oracle database like so:
select * from water_level where bore_id in ('85570', '112205','6011','SP068253');
This used to work fine but a recent update has meant that bore_id in water_level has had a bunch of whitespace added to the end for each row. So instead of '6011' it is now '6011 '. The number of space characters added to the end varies from 5 to 11.
Is there a way to edit my query to capture the bore_id in my list, taking account that trialling whitespace should be ignored?
I tried:
select * from water_level where bore_id in ('85570%', '112205%','6011%','SP068253%');
which returns more rows than I want, and
select * from water_level where bore_id in ('85570\s*', '112205\s*','6011\s*', 'SP068253\s*');
which didn't return anything?
Thanks
JP
You should RTRIM the WHERE clause
select * from water_level where RTRIM(bore_id) in ('85570', '112205','6011');
To add to that, RTRIM has an overload which you can pass a second parameter of what to trim, so if the trailing characters weren't spaces, you could remove them. For example if the data looked like 85570xxx, you could use:
select * from water_level where RTRIM(bore_id, 'x') IN ('85570','112205', '6011');
You could use the replace function to remove the spaces
select * from water_level where replace(bore_id, ' ', '') in ('85570', '112205', '6011', 'SP068253');
Although, a better option would be to remove the spaces from the data if they are not supposed to be there or create a view.
I'm guessing bore_id is VARCHAR or VARCHAR2. If it were CHAR, Oracle would use (SQL-standard) blank-padded comparison semantics, which regards 'foo' and 'foo ' as equivalent.
So, another approach is to force comparison as CHARs:
SELECT *
FROM water_level
WHERE CAST(bore_id AS CHAR(16)) IN ('85570', '112205', '6011', 'SP068253');
Just looking for another way to remove any excess spaces(>1) throughout a query. I'm taking information for my Oracle query from an Excel spreadsheet so there's bound to be some excess zeroes due to user error and whatnot so that when I'm taking the information from the excel it will have 2 sometimes 3 extra spaces after some values so we won't get any records returned from Oracle when we query it through the application. I have tried Trim(ds.Tables.Item(0).Rows.Item(k).Item(i).ToString.ToUpper) but this isn't removing the extra spaces in some of the values. Is there some SQL statement I don't know of or perhaps another reason why Trim isn't working?
Edit: Was writing replace function incorrectly.
Original: string.Replace(" ", " ")
New: string = string.replace(" ", " ")
Use String.Replace(" ", String.Empty) instead. Trim only removes leading and trailing spaces.
On the Oracle side, you can use the REGEXP_REPLACE function, but you need to apply it to each column you want to remove the extra spaces from:
SELECT
REGEXP_REPLACE(myCol1, ' {2,}', ' ') AS myCleanCol1,
REGEXP_REPLACE(myCol2, ' {2,}', ' ') AS myCleanCol2,
FROM myTable
The example here looks for all occurrences of two or more spaces (that's the second parameter) and replaces them with a single space (the third parameter).
You can use REGEXP_REPLACE
Could be something like this:
regexp_replace(your_column, '\s{2,}', '')
Here is a sqlfiddle demo
I am using this query to replace one character in a cell
select replace(id,',','')id from table
But I want to replace two characters in a cell.
If the cell is having this data (1,3.1), and I want it to look like this (131).
How can I replace two different characters in one cell?
Use TRANSLATE instead of REPLACE(). It replaces each occurrence of a character in the first pattern with its matched character in the second. To remove characters, simply leave cut short the replacement string:
select translate(id, '1,.', '1') id from table
Note that the second string cannot be null. Hence the need to include 1 (or some other character) in both strings.
Find out more.
Obviously the more characters you need to convert/remove the more attractive TRANSLATE() becomes. The main use for REPLACE is changing patterns (such as words) rather than individual characters.
Can use
select replace(translate(id,',.',' '),' ','') from table;
or
select regexp_replace('1,3.1','[,.]','') from dual;
or
select replace(replace(id,',',''),'.','') from table;
Call the replace again.
select replace(replace(id,',',''), '.','') id from table
Do this:
select REPLACE(REPLACE(id,',',''),'.','')
Or use a regular expression:
select regexp_replace(id, '[.,]', '') id from table
Find out more