Trailing Whitespace Characters

Combinations of characters with whitespace can occur in quoted strings, in CHAR columns that contain fewer characters than the declared column length, and in other contexts. For example, if a CHAR(5) column in a single-byte code set contains three characters, the string is padded with two white spaces so that its length is equal to the column length:

abcss

The next example represents a string of five characters (three characters of data and two trailing whitespace characters) in a multibyte code set where each of the data characters and whitespace characters consists of two bytes:

A1A2B1B2C1C2s1s2s1s2

In some locales, a string can contain both single-byte and multibyte whitespace characters. For example, consider the following string:

abcss1s2sss1s2

The string has three single-byte characters (abc), a single-byte whitespace character (s), a multibyte whitespace character (s¹s²), two single-byte white-space characters (ss), and one multibyte whitespace character (s¹s²).