Trailing spaces - is there an easier way?

I'm sure this has been asked before, but I couldn't find it:

I have a "zzz CHAR (8)" field. It needs to be CHAR because trailing
spaces need to be ignored for most operations. However, I need to
concatenate it with another (literal) string and need the spaces to be
significant in that operation. The *ONLY WAY* I could find to do it in
v9.0.1 was (represented in the following function):

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION padded( field CHAR ) RETURNS TEXT
RETURNS NULL ON NULL INPUT
IMMUTABLE
LANGUAGE SQL AS $SQL$
SELECT RPAD( $1, OCTET_LENGTH( $1 ) )
$SQL$;

And then of course I write:

SELECT padded( zzz ) || '/' || ...

Is there a better way?