Re: Substring auto trim

2010/1/13 Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com>:
> Hello
>
> 2010/1/13 Charles O'Farrell <charleso(at)gmail(dot)com>:
>> 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  '
>>
>
> You have to write C function substr for type "any" :( Because "char"
> and char(n) are two different types, and you cannot to write function
> for char(n)
>
>
>> 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.
>>

I thing, so there is workaround,

create or replace function substr(character, int, int) returns character as $$
select substr($1::cstring::text,$2,$3)
$$ language sql;

postgres=# create table f(a character(5));
CREATE TABLE
postgres=# insert into f values('a'),('ab'),('abc');
INSERT 0 3
postgres=# select * from f;
a
-------
a
ab
abc
(3 rows)

postgres=# select * from f where substr(a,1,3) = 'a ';
a
-------
a
(1 row)

postgres=# select * from f where substr(a,1,3) = 'ab ';
a
-------
ab
(1 row)

Regards
Pavel Stehule

>
> Function substr has first parameter of type "text". When pg call this
> function, then it does conversion from char(x) to text.
>
> Regards
> Pavel Stehule
>
>
>> 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
>>
>