[R] String comparison, trailing blanks make a difference.

[Hervé Pagès]

Hi John,

On 07/18/2014 09:17 AM, John McKown wrote:
> Well, this was a shock to me. And I don't really see any documentation
> about it, but perhaps I just can't see it.
>
>> "abc" == "abc"
> [1] FALSE
>
> I guess that I thought of strings in R like I do is some other
> languages where the shorter value is padded with blanks to the length
> of the longer value, then compared. I.e. that trailing blanks didn't
> matter.

The shock to me is to learn that some programming languages consider
strings "abc" and "abc " to be the same. Please name them so I can stay
away from them ;-)

Thanks,
H.

>
> The best solution that I have found is to use the str_trim() function
> from the stringr to remove all the trailing blanks after I get the
> data from the SQL data base. I cannot change the SQL schema to make
> the column a varchar instead of a char column. It is a vendor DB. And
> I don't know an ANSI SQL standard way to remove trailing blanks in the
> SELECT command. PostgreSQL has a "trim(trailing ' ' from column)', but
> MS-SQL upchucks on that syntax.
>

-- 
Hervé Pagès

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