Question

Sorry if this has been asked before, but I’ve been searching and can’t find a solution to my simple problem.

I need to select all rows where a varchar column in it has text in it (letters, numbers, or special characters), so I wrote a query like the following:

SELECT col1
FROM table
WHERE col1 IS NOT NULL

But this returns columns that contain the value ” (i.e. it’s blank, but is not set to NULL so it still gets returned).

I tried changing the query to this:

SELECT col1
FROM table
WHERE col1 IS NOT NULL
AND col1 != ''

But that didn’t work.

How do I stop the rows where the column is blank from being returned?

Answer 1

use TRIM there seems to be spaces in your column then

SELECT col1
FROM table
WHERE col1 IS NOT NULL
AND TRIM(col1) <> ''