TRIM

In SQL, the TRIM command removes leading and trailing spaces or specified characters from a string.

Syntax

TRIM([remove_chars] FROM string)

• remove_chars (Optional): The characters to be removed. If omitted, the function removes spaces by default.
• string: The string from which characters or spaces will be removed.

Example

Here’s a table users to be used in this example:

Here’s another table products to be used in this example as well:

The example below demonstrates how to remove leading and trailing spaces from the username column in the users table:

SELECT username, TRIM(username) AS cleaned_username
FROM users;

In this example, the TRIM command will remove any spaces from the beginning and end of the username field, returning the cleaned string as cleaned_username. The output will be as follows:

If a specific character needs to be removed, such as the hash symbol (#), from both ends of the string, the following query can be used:

SELECT TRIM('#' FROM product_code) AS cleaned_product_code
FROM products;

This will remove any hash symbols (#) from the beginning and end of each product_code string. The output will be as follows: