SQL Server RTRIM Function

Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to use the SQL Server RTRIM() function to truncate all trailing blanks from a string.

SQL Server RTRIM() function overview #

The RTRIM() function returns a string after truncating all trailing blanks. The following is the syntax of the RTRIM() function:

RTRIM(input_string)
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

In this syntax, the input_string is an expression of character or binary data. It can be a literal string, variable, or column.

The input_string must evaluate to a value of a data type, except for TEXT, NTEXT and IMAGE, that can be implicitly convertible to VARCHAR. Otherwise, you must use the CAST() function to convert it to a character string explicitly.

SQL Server RTRIM() function examples #

Let’s take some examples of using the RTRIM() function.

A) Using RTRIM() function with literal strings #

This example uses the RTRIM() function to truncate trailing blanks of the string 'SQL Server RTRIM function ':

SELECT 
    RTRIM('SQL Server RTRIM Function   ') result;
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Here is the output:

result
----------------------------
SQL Server RTRIM Function

(1 row affected)

B) Using RTRIM() function to clean up blanks in tables #

Suppose you want to remove trailing blanks in one or more column of a table. To do this, to do this you can use the following UPDATE statement:

UPDATE 
    table_name
SET 
    column_name = RTRIM(column_name);
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

For example, to remove all trailing blanks of the values in the first_name column in the sales.customers table, you use the following statement:

UPDATE 
    sales.customers
SET 
    first_name = RTRIM(first_name);
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

In this tutorial, you have learned how to use the SQL Server RTRIM() function to remove the trailing blanks from a string.