String Functions

A large number of system functions are available for manipulating data. This section looks purely at the string functions available for use within a T-SQL statement; later in the book, you will look at some more functions that are available. Following are the functions that are used in the next example:

• LTRIM/RTRIM: These perform similar functionality. If you have a string with leading spaces, and you wish to remove those leading spaces, you would use LTRIM so that the returned varchar value would have a nonspace character as its first value. If you have trailing spaces, you would use RTRIM. You can use this function only with a data type of varchar or nvarchar, or a data type that can be implicitly converted to these two data types, or with a data type converted to varchar or nvarchar using the CAST SQL Server function.