Remove Leading and Trailing Whitespace from MySQL Field Value

We can remove the leading and trailing whitespaces from MySQL with the help of trim() function.

The following is the syntax.

mysql> SELECT TRIM(' AnyStringWithWhitespaces ');

Let us now implement the above syntax in the below query.

mysql> SELECT TRIM(' Leading And Trailing whitespaces Demo ');

Here is the output that removes the whitespaces.

+---------------------------------------+
| TRIM(' Leading And Trailing whitespaces Demo ') |
+---------------------------------------+
| Leading And Trailing whitespaces Demo |
+---------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Let us now see another way to remove the leading and trailing whitespaces.

Firstly, let us create a new table.

mysql> create table TrimDemo2
-> (
-> name varchar(200)
-> );
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.53 sec)

Inserting a record with whitespace.

mysql> insert into TrimDemo2 values(' John ');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.13 sec)

Displaying the record.

mysql> select *from TrimDemo2;

Here is the output.

+--------------------+
| name               |
+--------------------+
| John                |
+--------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Let us now see the query to remove the leading and trailing whitespace.

mysql> UPDATE TrimDemo2 set name = TRIM(name);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.20 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0

Here is the implementation.

mysql> select *from TrimDemo2;

The following is the output that shows the leading and trailing whitespaces are now removed.

+------+
| name |
+------+
| John |
+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)