Substring auto trim - Mailing list pgsql-bugs

From Charles O'Farrell
Subject Substring auto trim
Date
Msg-id 65d71e1c1001130102j5f46299cm87477efcfd0c5a51@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: Substring auto trim  (Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com>)
Re: Substring auto trim  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-bugs
Hi guys,

I'm not sure whether this a really dumb question, but I'm curious as to what
might be the problem.

We have a column 'foo' which is of type character (not varying).

select substr(foo, 1, 10) from bar

The result of this query are values whose trailing spaces have been trimmed
automatically. This causes incorrect results when comparing to a value that
may contain trailing spaces.

select * from bar where substr(foo, 1, 4) = 'AB  '

I should mention that we normally run Oracle and DB2 (and have done for many
years), but I have been pushing for Postgres as an alternative.
Fortunately this is all handled through Hibernate, and so for now I have
wrapped the substr command in rpad which seems to do the trick.

Any light you can shed on this issue would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Charles O'Farrell

PostgreSQL 8.4.2 on i486-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc-4.4.real (Ubuntu
4.4.1-4ubuntu8) 4.4.1, 32-bit

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