Re: *BLANKS = spaces?

[Jim Langston <jlangston@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We wary of the programming language you are using (in this case SQL).  Some 
languages say
' ' = '  ' (one space and 2 spaces are equal).

Some say
' ' <> '  ' (one space and 2 spaces are not equal).

In some languages, if I have a filed 5 characters long and I want to see if it 
is blank I have to use
if SomeField = '     ' then...

some can use
if SomeField = '' (no spaces = *blanks).

and then some require
if SomeField = ' ' (one space) will work

Regards,

Jim Langston

Carel Teijgeler wrote:

> Douglas Handy wrote:
>
> > It is the same.  There is no difference between a "blank" and a
> > "space" -- they are synonyms for x'40' in EBCDIC.
> >
>
> Not completely true, I fear.
>
> I once did an SQL on a file to retrieve two records that were not correctly
> filled. One character field in those records was empty in comparison to the 
>rest
> of the records.
>
> I wrote SELECT * FROM file WHERE field = ' ' (one space) and I got no result.
> Then I tried SELECT * FROM file WHERE field < ' ' (one space) and the two 
>records
> were returned.
>
> You would expect spaces, but they were *BLANKS.
>
> Carel.

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