need help on whitespace

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need help on whitespace

dhananjay.nagarkar

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Points: 1496
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March 2, 2013 at 5:02 am

#290466

I want to remove leading whitespace from a string only if the string has one leading whitespace , if two leading whitespaces then do not ltrim. Can this be done in tsql I'm using 2008

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zzalina0 SSCommitted Points: 1524 More actions · Answer 1

Hi)

You can use wild cards to define if there is one whitespace or more:

declare @a nvarchar(50)

set @a=' with one leading whitespace'

select @a=case when @a like ' [^ ]%' then LTRIM(@a) end

print @a

' [^ ]%' - means that the first character of string should be the whitespace

second character of string shouldn't be the whitespace

other characters are arbitrary.

dhananjay.nagarkar Default port Points: 1496 More actions · Answer 2

Hi,

sorry if I was not clear in my request above,

Basically what I'm looking for is-

I have string with value "HPJP00000013"

if this field value has one LEADING SPACE /WHITE SPACE i.e. " HPJP00000013" then TRIM it out BUT if there are 2 LEADING SPACES/WHOTE SPACES i.e. " HPJP00000013" then do not do any trimming.

if I use LTRIM then it trims out all LEADING SPACES/WHITE SPACES which is not what i need.

If you can please help me with this would be much obliged since I'm very new to TSQL world .

Kind Regards

Dhananjay

dhananjay.nagarkar Default port Points: 1496 More actions · Answer 3

Hi,

seems the code you gave is workign just tried-

//

declare @a nvarchar(50)

set @a= 'HPJP00000013'

select @a=case when @a like ' [^ ]%' then LTRIM(@a) end

print @a

//

When I put one leading space then it lTRIMS it out if I out 2 or more leading spaces then it does LTRIM it out.

Thanks so much foer the help.

thanks

DJ