Question

I imported data from csv files into a MySQL database, but made the mistake of not
removing the trailing spaces in the csv columns. So the spaces are seen as ‘?’ at
the end of some values in the database (of type Varchar). I want to get rid of these.
Can I somehow delete all these ?s in the database in one go? I know of the replace
command, but I think that works on a single column of a singe table at a time, which will
be very time consuming for me. Could anyone please suggest something better? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use the trim function

UPDATE table SET column = TRIM(TRAILING '?' FROM column)