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From: Michal Taborsky <M.Taborsky@sh.cvut.cz>
X-Newsgroups: comp.databases.postgresql.sql
Subject: Concatenating does not work properly
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 16:14:41 +0200
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Hello,

I am facing a problem I cannot really explain to myself. I have a table 
with personal data which has columns surname, firstname, secondname, 
title and I want to do a simple select like this:

SELECT (surname || ', ' || firstname || ' ' || secondname) as fullname 
FROM person

For some rows (from what I recognised it is with rows, which have the 
title column empty) it works, for some it returns empty string:

akcent=# SELECT (surname || ', ' || firstname || ' ' || secondname) as 
fullname, title_pre, surname, firstname, secondname FROM person;

        fullname        | title_pre | surname  | firstname | secondname
-----------------------+-----------+----------+-----------+------------
                        | Ing.      | Taborsky | Michal    |
                        | Ing.      | Barta    | David     |
  Novak, Josef          |           | Novak    | Josef     |
  Saroch, Adrian Walter |           | Saroch   | Adrian    | Walter
(4 rows)

Is that a bug or am I missing something ?

Thanks,
Michal