Question

I have a table in a SQL Server 2008 database. This table has a nvarchar(256) column called ‘Name’. Unfortunately, the values in this field have extra spaces included. For instance the name ‘Bill’ is actually stored as ‘Bill ‘ in the table.

I want to update all of the records in this table to remove the extra spaces. However, I was surprised to learn that SQL does not have a TRIM function.

How do I update all of the records at once to remove the extra spaces?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You do have an RTRIM and an LTRIM function. You can combine them to get the trim function you want.

UPDATE Table
SET Name = RTRIM(LTRIM(Name))