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Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 17:00:19 -0700 (PDT)
From: Stephan Szabo <sszabo@megazone.bigpanda.com>
To: "Gregory S. Williamson" <gsw@globexplorer.com>
Cc: <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: lower/upper functions and strings in searches
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On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Gregory S. Williamson wrote:

> I am obviuously doing some newbie trick, and I ordinarily would spend time browing the archives, but the archives.postgresql.org site seems to be absurdly slow.
>
> This is 7.3.3 on a linux box.
>
> I have a bunch of data with state, city, county and country names. When our application does a search for an exact match:
>
> select * from gx_geotowns where l_state = 'NM';
>   I get back a lot of rows of cities in New Mexico, as expected.
>
> If I try:
>
> select * from gx_geotowns where upper(l_state) = upper('nm');

You say the column is of type CHAR(), but CHAR(2) or something else?

For 7.3 and earlier, you're going to get a text comparison which means
that trailing spaces are significant (it's effectively no pad in text vs
pad space in char).