How to Trim Strings in SQL Database: SQL PostgreSQL Oracle MySQL Operators: TRIM LEADING TRAILING BOTH Table of Contents Problem: Example: Solution: Discussion: Problem: You’d like to remove specific characters from the beginning and end of a string in SQL. Example: Our database has a table named post with data in two columns: id and title. idtitle 1' News about dogs ' 3'Eurovision 2019 ' 4'New political climate' Let’s trim the title of each post to remove the unnecessary space at the beginning and end. Solution: We’ll use the TRIM function. Here’s the query you would write: SELECT TRIM(BOTH ' ' FROM title) as new_title FROM post; Alternatively, you can use the shorter version without the BOTH keyword; by default, TRIM will treat this as a BOTH operation. SELECT TRIM(' ' FROM title) as new_title FROM post; Here’s the result of both queries: new_title ‘News about dogs’ ‘Eurovision 2019’ ‘New political climate’ Discussion: Use the TRIM function if you want to trim a string in a table. This function allows you to remove a specific character from the beginning or end of a string, or from both ends. This function takes the following arguments: An optional keyword specifying the ends from which to trim. Possible keywords are: BOTH (remove from the beginning and the end). This is the default option if no keyword is given. TRAILING (remove from the end) LEADING (remove from the beginning) The character you want to trim from the string. The FROM keyword, followed by the the string to be trimmed. In our example, that looks like: TRIM(BOTH ' ' FROM title) The example below removes the space at the end of each title: SELECT TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM title) as new_title FROM post; The query returns the title column without a space at the end. Notice that the spaces at the beginning are left untouched. new_title ' News about dogs' 'Eurovision 2019' ' New political climate' You can write a similar query to trim the space at the beginning if you use the LEADING keyword instead: SELECT TRIM(LEADING ' ' FROM title) as new_title FROM post; Recommended courses: SQL Basics SQL Practice Set Standard SQL Functions Recommended articles: Standard SQL Functions Cheat Sheet 5 SQL Functions for Manipulating Strings 18 Useful Important SQL Functions to Learn ASAP SQL String Functions: A Complete Overview See also: How to Replace Part of a String in SQL Subscribe to our newsletter Join our monthly newsletter to be notified about the latest posts. Email address How Do You Write a SELECT Statement in SQL? What Is a Foreign Key in SQL? Enumerate and Explain All the Basic Elements of an SQL Query