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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T00:22:32+00:00

i have a table [Company] with a column [Address3] defined as varchar(50) i can

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i have a table [Company] with a column [Address3] defined as varchar(50)
i can not control the values entered into that table – but i need to extract the values without leading and trailing spaces. i perform the following query:

SELECT DISTINCT RTRIM(LTRIM([Address3])) Address3 FROM [Company] ORDER BY Address3

the column contain both rtl and ltr values
most of the data retrieved is retrieved correctly – but SOME (not all) RTL values are returned with leading and or trailing spaces

i attempted to perform the following query:

SELECT DISTINCT ltrim(rTRIM(ltrim(rTRIM([Address3])))) c, ltrim(rTRIM([Address3])) b, [Address3] a, rtrim(LTRIM([Address3])) Address3 FROM [Company] ORDER BY Address3

but it returned the same problem on all columns – anyone has any idea what could cause it?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The rows that return with extraneous spaces might have a kind of space or invisible character the trim functions don’t know about. The documentation doesn’t even mention what is considered “a blank” (pretty damn sloppy if you ask me). Try taking one of those rows and looking at the characters one by one to see what character they are.

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