On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Wm.A.Stafford
<stafford@marine.rutgers.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.
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