My investigations show me that if null fields are present, nothing is returned. Thus fields "right" of a null field will be moved left one field.
I think the same mighthappen if you use varchar strings instead of fixed-length strings. If a string s is declared as char(n), and the actual size of s is 2 and n >= 2, the next field will be moved n - 2 chars to the left in the string that contains the result of the query.
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Per Erik Rønne
E-mail per@idp.dk (office)
Telephone +45 32 83 63 17 (office), +45 26 16 48 10 (mobile)
Further experiments show that the row marks mentioned - NULL values in the row, at least NULL values in fields _before_ the field in question.
[SNIP the original message - article otherwise too long]