On 10/18/19 8:51 AM, Adrian Klaver wrote:
> On 10/18/19 7:42 AM, Matthias Apitz wrote:
>> El día viernes, octubre 18, 2019 a las 03:01:58p. m. +0200, Tom Lane
>> escribió:
>>
>>> Matthias Apitz <guru@unixarea.de> writes:
>>>> When we export char columns with our Perl tools, they come out
>>>> with trailing blanks (in Sybase they don't). Can this be suppressed?
>>>
>>> Switch to varchar, perhaps?
>>>
>>> regards, tom lane
>>
>> Sometimes people does not know, what they propose. We have a historical
>> 25 years grown ILS which runs on top of Sybase, Oracle, Informix ... and
>> should now be ported to PostgreSQL. We can't simple switch internal
>> table structures and adopt some 10.000.000 lines of code (or debug while
>> it is now crashing).
>
> That was not mentioned in the original post. Anyway:
>
> https://metacpan.org/pod/DBD::Pg#ChopBlanks-(boolean,-inherited)
>
> https://metacpan.org/pod/DBI
>
> "ChopBlanks
>
> Type: boolean, inherited
>
> The ChopBlanks attribute can be used to control the trimming of
> trailing space characters from fixed width character (CHAR) fields. No
> other field types are affected, even where field values have trailing
> spaces.
>
> The default is false (although it is possible that the default may
> change). Applications that need specific behaviour should set the
> attribute as needed.
>
> Drivers are not required to support this attribute, but any driver
> which does not support it must arrange to return undef as the
> attribute value."
>
>>
>> Thanks anyway.
>>
>> matthias
>>
>>
>
>
It seems to me you've simply exposed a bug in you ILS. If blanks
intentionally went in, would they not get truncated on the way out in
the other systems? If all trailing blanks are expendable perhaps your
saves should remove them. (And a trimming of the existing records is in
order.)