Question

I have three fields that I concatenated into one field, but when I run the query the result-set is correct, but they are not evenly spaced within the one field. How would I space them neatly and correctly. Thank-you for the help.

Here is the query:

SELECT CONVERT(varchar(20),Book)+ Space(2) + '(' + CONVERT(varchar(30),Year)
+ ')' + Space(2) + '(' + CONVERT(varchar(30),Print) + ')' As  'Film Description', Genre,
Cost
FROM Film
Order By Year DESC, Book ASC

Answer 1

Since VARCHAR ignores trailing spaces, you need to use a different data type that doesn’t (e.g. CHAR). A few other comments:

• be careful about using reserved words such as year and print as column names
• be careful about using 'single quotes' as alias delimiters ([square brackets] are more future-proof and harder to muddle with string literals)
• you should use the schema prefix (e.g. dbo.Film)

DECLARE @Film TABLE(Book VARCHAR(255), [Year] INT, [Print] VARCHAR(255));

INSERT @Film 
SELECT 'a', 2012, 'hello there this is at least 30 characters, right?'
UNION ALL 
SELECT 'this must be at least 30 characters too, right?', 2011, 'b';

SELECT CONVERT(CHAR(20), Book)
 + SPACE(2) 
 + '(' + CONVERT(CHAR(4),[Year]) + ')' 
 + SPACE(2) 
 + '(' + CONVERT(CHAR(30), [Print]) + ')' 
 As [Film Description]
FROM @Film
Order By [Year] DESC, Book;