Re: Space-padded Strings and Stored Procedures

SELECT TRIM( fullname ) INTO ... Best regards, Danail -----Original Message----- From: Paul Harman <paul@kasterborus.demon.co.uk> To: informix-list@iiug.org <informix-list@iiug.org> Date: 11 '''''''' 2000 '. 15:15 Subject: Space-padded Strings and Stored Procedures >I'm running Informix Dynamic Server Version 7.30.UC7 (straight from >onstat!). > >I have a stored procedure to perform an audit trailing function. It takes in >an ID, performs a lookup on the appropriate table using this ID to get a >"name", and then enters this name into the audit table, thusly: > >CREATE PROCEDURE valueadded(vid INT) > DEFINE valuename VARCHAR(255);> DEFINE details VARCHAR(255); > > SELECT fullname INTO valuename FROM value WHERE valueid=vid; > LET details="Added " || valuename || " value"; > INSERT INTO audit (occurred, comment) VALUES (CURRENT, details);>END PROCEDURE; > >My problem is that the "fullname" field in the "value" table is a char 128 - >and thus gets padded out with spaces. This means that there is a tremendous >amount of surplus white space before the word 'value' in the log. > >[Obviously this example is rather artificial, but I can't give exact code >snippets] > >Is there any way of "trimming" this space? It's no problem to me when I use >Java or Perl (the main apps running on the DB) because I can .trim() or >s/\\s+$// respectively, but I can't find a similar mechanism to do this in >Stored Procedures - and for performance reasons I don't want to change the >value table to use a varchar for the fullname attribute. > >Anyone have any good ideas? Many thanks in advance, > > Paul > >