Re: Identifying Reason for Column Name Returned by SELECT

Your example suggests that the "GW-22" is a substring of the field followed by
trailing spaces so you'll want something that searches substrings, whereas "="
will always just test on matching the entire field.

Try "like" by default, such as "where site_id like 'GW-22 %'".  I added the
space between the 22 and the wildcard % so that the field containing just
'GW-22' isn't also matched.

If you need something more specific than simple substring match, you can use a
regular expression, which I think is spelled like "where site_id ~ '...'" but
check the manual to be sure about regexp syntax.  But "like" will probably do
you here.

-- Darren Duncan

Rich Shepard wrote:
>   I run this SELECT statement on a table:
>
> select distinct(site_id) from chemistry order by site_id;
>
> and in the returned set I see:
>
>  GW-21
>  GW-22
>  GW-22         +
>
>  GW-24
>
>   I want to find that row returning 'GW-22      +' because I believe it
> should be 'GW-23'. However, my attempts to retrieve that row keep failing.
> I've tried these statements:
>
> select count(*) from chemistry where site_id = 'GW-22         +';
>  count -------
>      0
> (1 row)
>
> yet,
>
> select count(*) from chemistry where site_id = 'GW-22';
>  count -------
>    803
> (1 row)
>
>   Looking for the blank row also fails when I try to specify site_id as is
> null, = ' ', or =''.
>
>   Please point me to the proper way of finding this rogue row so I can
> correct the value in the site_id column.
>
> TIA,
>
> Rich
>