Trailing and Leading Spaces

Question

Hi we use file shares on a windows 2003 server for our storage for our macs. some of macs are 10.4 and some 10.5. We have a major problem in that when some of our windows users try and access these files they cant and even in some cases the files/folders disappear.
After a lot of rooting around we found that the macs were creating these trailing spaces/leading spaces when they either accessed or created a folder on the windows share, please someone out there tell me there is something i can do to fix this and stop this from happening.
cheers

Answer 1

Hi,
Purvesh K wrote:
One another way using Regular Expressions!!!
Assumes Alphabets or Numbers follow before and after the Space. If Special characters are to be included, query will have to be modified.This also assumes that the same column has to have both leading and training spaces. (Etbin's solution found rows where any column had either, not necessarily both, leading ad trailing spaces.)
with data (col) as
select 'first' from dual union all
select 'first ' from dual union all
select ' first ' from dual
select *
from data
where regexp_like(col, '[[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]]+[[:space:]]+')
COL  
first Try adding
select 'This has embedded spaces.' from dual union allto the sample data. The code above finds this row, even though it has neither leading nor trailing spaces.
Remember that regular expressions are not anchored . The pattern can start and/or end anywhere in the string. In the example above, the substring ' has ' matches the pattern you gave. If you're using regular expressions, anchor them to the beginning and end of the string using ^ and $.
So
where regexp_like(col, '^[[:space:]].*[[:space:]]$')would be better. However, that would miss cols tha consisted of a single space. To include them:
where regexp_like(col, '^[[:space:]](.*[[:space:]])?$')OP: If none of these solutons match your needs, then we don't understand your needs. Post a little sample data (CREATE TABLE and INSERT statements, or a WITH clause, like Purvesh used) and the results you want from that data.
Regular expressions do wonderful things, but they don't do them very fast. If perfrmance is important, use TRIM (like Etbin suggested), or LIKE, or SUBSTR.