Eddie Awad’s Blog - Latest Comments in SQL Function Spotlight: TRIM

Re: SQL Function Spotlight: TRIM

Eddie Awad — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:42:35 -0000

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

Re: SQL Function Spotlight: TRIM

Brian Tkatch — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:52:59 -0000

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

Re: SQL Function Spotlight: TRIM

Eddie Awad — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:27:35 -0000

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

Re: SQL Function Spotlight: TRIM

Mathias Magnusson — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:25:27 -0000

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).

Re: SQL Function Spotlight: TRIM

Eddie Awad — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:27:01 -0000

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.

Re: SQL Function Spotlight: TRIM

Laurent Schneider — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:35:50 -0000

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 !

SQL> select ltrim('elcaroracle','racle') from dual

LTRIM(
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oracle