Re: NULLS and string concatenation

Someone on this list provided me with a rather elegant solution to this a few weeks ago:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION text_concat_nulls_with_an_embedded_space(text, text) RETURNS text AS 'SELECT CASE WHEN $1 IS NULL THEN $2 WHEN $2 IS NULL THEN $1 ELSE $1 || '' '' || $2 END' LANGUAGE sql;

CREATE OPERATOR ||~ (PROCEDURE = text_concat_nulls_with_an_embedded_space, LEFTARG = text, RIGHTARG = text);

And I call it as:
SELECT (trim(s_directio) ||~ trim(s_house) ||~ trim(s_post_dir) ||~ trim(s_street) ||~ trim(s_suffix)) as street ... (yadda yadda)

Deals quite neatly with the NULLs in some of the columns.

HTH,

Greg Williamson
DBA
GlobeXplorer LLC

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Fuhr [mailto:mike(at)fuhr(dot)org]
Sent: Fri 11/19/2004 9:53 AM
To: Don Drake; pgsql-sql(at)postgresql(dot)org
Cc:
Subject: Re: [SQL] NULLS and string concatenation
On Fri, Nov 19, 2004 at 11:45:43AM -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 19, 2004 at 11:12:38 -0600, Don Drake <dondrake(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >
> > I was able to work around the problem by using COALESCE (and casting
> > variables since it wants the same data types passed to it).
>
> This is what you should do.

If you don't mind using a non-standard feature, another possibility
would be to create an operator similar to || that COALESCEs NULLs
into empty strings.

--
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/

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