6 comments

• 

  Laurent Schneider

  4 months ago

  there is one major advantage of using ltrim (rtrim), with ltrim you can skip any character from a range, with trim the character is a single character !
  <pre>
  SQL> select ltrim('elcaroracle','racle') from dual
  
  LTRIM(
  ------
  oracle
  </pre>
  reply
• 

  Eddie Awad

  4 months ago

  Indeed, if you want to trim more than one character on either or both ends of a string, TRIM is not the function to use.
  reply
• 

  Mathias Magnusson

  4 months ago

  I like using trim on dates. I have seen many elaborate ways of converting to char to remove it and then convert back to date. Using trim seems to be the slick way to just remove the time (making it zero).
  reply
• 

  Eddie Awad

  4 months ago

  Hmm! What is the difference between trim(sysdate) and to_char(sysdate)?
  reply
• 

  Brian Tkatch

  4 months ago

  So, TRIM and TO_CHAR seem the same by a DATE:
  
  SELECT TRIM(SysDate), DUMP(TRIM(SysDate)) FROM Dual UNION ALL
  SELECT TO_CHAR(SysDate), DUMP(TO_CHAR(SysDate)) FROM Dual;
  
  05-SEP-08 Typ=1 Len=9: 48,53,45,83,69,80,45,48,56
  05-SEP-08 Typ=1 Len=9: 48,53,45,83,69,80,45,48,56
  
  TRUNC, however, leaves it as a DATE, which is possible the best way to remove the time.
  
  SELECT SysDate, DUMP(SysDate) FROM Dual UNION ALL
  SELECT TRUNC(SysDate), DUMP(TRUNC(SysDate)) FROM Dual;
  
  05-SEP-08 Typ=13 Len=8: 216,7,9,5,8,51,44,0
  05-SEP-08 Typ=13 Len=8: 216,7,9,5,0,0,0,0
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• 

  Eddie Awad

  4 months ago

  Thanks Brian. By the way, nice use of the DUMP function.
  reply