[dba-SQLServer] strip all leading / trailing spaces

Hi John,

Are there more than 64,000 rows?

;-)

Dan Waters

-----Original Message-----
Subject: [dba-SQLServer] strip all leading / trailing spaces

Folks,
 
Does anyone have a "something" in SQL Server that will take the name of a
table, figure out all of the field names in the table, and return a data set
with all of the data stripped of leading and trailing spaces?
 
I have tables where the data waqs brought in to SQL Server from a fixed
width file, padded right (mostly) with spaces.  Thus the data is represented
inside the table as fixed width with spaces to the right of any real data.
I need to get the data out, strip the spaces (both leading and trailing) and
the write that data back into the same or another table, doesn't matter
which to me.  I know how to do this by creating a view and then use
"ltrim(rtrim(data)) as SomeFieldName" kind of a thing but that means a
custom view for each table, manually edited to create these "ltrim(rtrim("
constructs.  I assume if I knew how to do udfs or stored procedures that you
could go get the field names of the fields and dynamically build a sql
string.
 
Has anyone seen such a thing?
 
John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com
 
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