Re: removing leading and trailing blanks from every row in a table

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Wm.A.Stafford
<stafford(at)marine(dot)rutgers(dot)edu> wrote:
> I need a procedure to remove leading and trailing blanks from column of
> every row in a table. I would like to pass the table name as a parameter
> and have the procedure do the rest. Does something like this already exist?
> Is it even possible?

There is a function that can help with this...

testdb=> select '|'|| btrim (' foo', ' ') || '|';
?column?
----------
|foo|
(1 row)

I wouldn't run it against every column, particularly as some columns
won't be text.

But you could certainly loop through a series of tables and columns
with queries like:
update my_table set some_col = btrim(some_col, ' ') where some_col
is not null and btrim(some_col, ' ') <> some_col;

I wouldn't want to run this indiscriminately, as there is a risk of
this breaking uniqueness and failing.

I would instead want to do this selectively.
--
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
George Burns - "You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old."