extracting substring of a character string in oracle V7

I was wondering if anyone can help me. I have a table called Mes_hdrs which contains certain information about email mesage header information.

I am doing dynamic sql queries over it in which the resulting string in the fetch is a concatenation of certain columns from the table.

I have the subject line currently at 200 characters

Now when I concatenate the string all blank spaces are concatenated into the returned string. Is there as easy way in which only the filled portion of each column is fetched and copied into the string.

I have tried substr(subject,1,length(subject)) but this does not seem to work

Thanks,

        matt Received on Sat Sep 03 1994 - 11:06:16 CEST