Trailing white space characters

Combinations of characters with white space can occur in quoted strings, in CHAR columns that contain fewer characters than the declared column length, and in other contexts.

For example, if a CHAR(5) column in a single-byte code set contains three characters, the string is padded with two white spaces so that its length is equal to the column length:

abcss

The next example represents a string of five characters (three characters of data and two trailing white space characters) in a multibyte code set where each of the data characters and white space characters consists of 2 bytes:

A¹A²B¹B²C¹C²s¹s²s¹s²

In some locales, a string can contain both single-byte and multibyte white space characters. For example, consider the following string:

abcss¹s²sss¹s²

The string has three single-byte characters (abc), a single-byte white space character (s), a multibyte white space character (s¹s²), two single-byte white space characters (ss), and one multibyte white space character (s¹s²).