Remove leading comma in Places

#1 · 2022-10-26, 9:13 am

Ed Bell posted this question in a comment on Places: Delete Unused:

I have a lot of Places that have leading commas:
", Abbeville, South Carolina, United States"
I want to remove the leading commas.

Anyone?

#2 · 2022-10-26, 12:06 pm

This seems to work:

-- List Place Names having a comma preceding the name with any number
-- of space characters around the comma
SELECT Name, TRIM(SUBSTR(TRIM(Name),2)) FROM PlaceTable
WHERE TRIM(Name) LIKE ',%'
;
-- Update Place Names to remove the leading comma and adjacent space characters
-- Repeat for multiple leading commas
UPDATE PlaceTable
SET Name = TRIM(SUBSTR(TRIM(Name),2))
WHERE TRIM(Name) LIKE ',%'
;

For reference, see Search & Replace.

#3 · 2022-10-26, 9:55 pm

Perfect!

Thanks so much.

I think I need to learn SQL. 🙂