Remove trailing empty space in a field content

Question

I am using SQL server MSDE 2000. I have a field called notes of type nvarchar(65).

The content is \'Something \' with an extra space after the content

Answer 1

Are you sure the query isn't working? Try:

SELECT TOP 100 '~'+ t.notes +'~'
  FROM TABLE1 t

TOP 100 will limit the results to the first 100 rows, enough to get an idea if there's really a space in the output. If there is, and RTRIM/LTRIM is not removing it - then you aren't dealing with a whitespace character. In that case, try:

UPDATE TABLE1
  SET notes = REPLACE(notes, 
                      SUBSTRING(notes, PATINDEX('%[^a-zA-Z0-9 '''''']%', notes), 1), 
                      '')
WHERE PATINDEX('%[^a-zA-Z0-9 '''''']%', notes) <> 0

Answer 2

And just in case you need to TRIM all spaces in all columns, you can use this script to do it dynamically:

--Just change table name
declare @MyTable varchar(100)
set @MyTable = 'MyTable'

--temp table to get column names and a row id
select column_name, ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY column_name) as id into #tempcols from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS 
WHERE   DATA_TYPE IN ('varchar', 'nvarchar') and TABLE_NAME = @MyTable

declare @tri int
select @tri = count(*) from #tempcols
declare @i int
select @i = 0
declare @trimmer nvarchar(max)
declare @comma varchar(1)
set @comma = ', '

--Build Update query
select @trimmer = 'UPDATE [dbo].[' + @MyTable + '] SET '

WHILE @i <= @tri 
BEGIN

    IF (@i = @tri)
        BEGIN
        set @comma = ''
        END
    SELECT  @trimmer = @trimmer + CHAR(10)+ '[' + COLUMN_NAME + '] = LTRIM(RTRIM([' + COLUMN_NAME + ']))'+@comma
    FROM    #tempcols
    where id = @i

    select @i = @i+1
END

--execute the entire query
EXEC sp_executesql @trimmer

drop table #tempcols

Answer 3

... OR you could literally just copy/paste the blank ' ' (space) at the end of a field as a result of your query into your replace statement and update everything from there.

update TABLE1
set notes = replace(notes, ' ', '')