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What is the line feed character in SQL?

Rudy Limeback EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: Rudy Limeback

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QUESTION POSED ON: 12 June 2007

What is the line feed character in SQL and what is the ASCII value of it?


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EXPERT RESPONSE

SQL itself doesn't use line feed characters because the line feed character, like the space and the carriage return character, is considered "white space." SQL treats all consecutive "white space" characters as a single space.

Therefore, this query --

select foo
  from bar
 where fap = 'qux'

is interpreted the same way as this query --

select foo from bar where fap = 'qux'

However, the former style (multi-line, with indentation) is a lot easier to read and understand than the single-line monolithic query style, especially for larger queries.

The only time you'd need to know its ASCII value is when, for example, you're searching for data values containing a line feed character. In that case, you are looking for a single byte with the binary value 0110, which is equivalent to decimal 10 or hexadecimal 0A. In standard SQL, you can use "X" notation to represent hexadecimal characters. For example,

select username, body
  from comments
 where body like '%' || x'0A' || '%'

This finds all comments where the body contains a line feed character.


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