Re: behaviour of LENGTH() in postgresql v. 8 - Mailing list pgsql-novice

Marcus Andree S. Magalhaes wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> While checking the last Beta3-Beta4 Changelog of Postgres 8.0,
> I saw the following:
>
>     * doc/TODO: Remove completed items:
>         <snip>
>           * -Make LENGTH() of
>       CHAR() not count trailing spaces
>
> If I understand correctly, this will lead to the following situation:
>
>       CHAR_LENGTH('ABCD') == CHAR_LENGTH('ABCD    ') == 4
>
> This will definitely break some of our applications.
>
> Just want to be sure if this LENGTH() behaviour _will_ appear
> on the next version of Postgres. If true, can we somehow revert
> to the current LENGTH() behaviour?
>
> Can someone, please, clarify this issue?

You should review the release notes.  The full description is:

     * Make length() disregard trailing spaces in CHAR(n) (Gavin)
       This change was made to improve consistency: trailing spaces
       are semantically insignificant in CHAR(n) data, so
       they should not be counted by length().

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