SQL OUTPUT PUZZLE ? | The Concatenation Puzzle | SQL Interview Question

This was recently asked to me by a junior developer. He was doing some development of concatenating few fields. Here you have to go through the SQL given below and the provide me the expected output in the comments section with the reason.

What will be the output of the below SQL?

--

DECLARE @Var CHAR(20)='Hi-'
SET @Var=@Var+'Pawan' 
SELECT @Var
GO

--

OUTPUT

--


--------------------
Hi-                 

(1 row affected)


--

Reason

–Here you will only get ‘Hi- ‘ and with naked eyes you
will only see Hi-. This is because CHAR is a fixed data type, the rest of the string would be padded with blanks. So if you want to see all the characters. You need to use like below-

--


DECLARE @Var CHAR(20)='Hi-'
SET @Var=@Var+'Pawan' 
SET @Var = REPLACE(@Var,' ','Z')
SELECT @Var
GO

OUTPUT

(No column name)
Hi-ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

--

Solution

The best idea here is to use VARCHAR data type like below-

--

DECLARE @Var VARCHAR(20)='Hi-'
SET @Var=@Var+'Pawan' 
SELECT @Var
GO

--OUTPUT

--------------------
Hi-Pawan

(1 row affected)


--

Enjoy 🙂

Please add comment(s) if you have one or multiple solutions in mind. Thank You.

Pawan Khowal

Pawan is a SQL Server Developer. If you need any help in writing code/puzzle or training please email at – pawankkmr”AT”gmail.com. Meanwhile please go throgh the top pages from his blog.

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