extra character at the end of data?

I just inherited a database and to my dismay, my sql statements were failing to return results most of the time. I have a list of countries, and when I return a distinct on that list, placing " " characters before and after the data, there seems to be an extra space at the end of most of the countries. (Data visually returned: "UNITED STATES ". The field is a NOT NULL VARCHAR2(50) field. If I do a:

country = 'UNITED STATES'

it returns no results. If I do a:

country like 'UNITED STATES%'

it returns the US entry.

If I just do a:

country = 'UNITED STATES '

with a space at the end, it fails to return anything.

Any ideas what is going on here? A couple of the countries return with no extra blank looking spaces, and those work fine. Thanks.

JR Received on Thu Jan 03 2002 - 13:49:01 CST