Question

This seems like a simple question. I want to query the MySQL data base where a column is null, “”, or white space. The way I do it now is like this:

select * from table where column_1 is null or REPLACE(column_1," ","") = ""; 

Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Your current method will not show NULLs because of three valued logic

select * from table where column_1 IS NULL OR TRIM(column_1) = '';

or

select * from table where COALESCE(TRIM(column_1), '') = '';