Oracle LTRIM

Oracle LTRIM() function removes from the left-end of a string all characters contained in a set.

Syntax

The following illustrates the syntax of the Oracle LTRIM() function:

LTRIM(trim_source,[set])
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Arguments

The LTRIM() function accepts two arguments:

1) trim_source

is the string that unwanted characters should be removed.

2) set

is a set that contains one or more characters which should be removed from the trim_source string.

The setargument is optional. If you don’t specify it, the set will default to a single space.

The data types of both trim_source and set can be one of the following types CHAR, VARCHAR2, NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, CLOB, or NCLOB.

Return Value

The LTRIM() function returns a string with all characters contained in the set are removed from the left end of the string.

The result string has the VARCHAR2 data type if the  source_string is a character value or LOB if source_string is a LOB value.

Examples

The following example removes all spaces from the left end of a string '  XYZ':

SELECT
  LTRIM( '  XYZ' )
FROM
  dual;  Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

In this statement, we did not specify the character set that should be removed, the LTRIM() function removed spaces by default.

Here is the result.

'XYZ'Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

The following example illustrates how to remove characters in a set of (1,2,3) from the left end of the string 'XYZ123456'

SELECT
  LTRIM( '123456XYZ', '123' )
FROM
  dual;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

The result is:

456XYZ
Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

Let’s take a look at the following products table in the sample database:

The following statement returns products whose names start with 'ASRock'

SELECT
  product_name
FROM
  products
WHERE
  product_name LIKE 'ASRock%'
ORDER BY
  product_name;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

You can use the LTRIM() function to remove the 'ASRock' string from the product names to make shorter as follows:

SELECT
  product_name, 
  LTRIM( product_name, 'ASRock' ) short_product_name
FROM
  products
WHERE
  product_name LIKE 'ASRock%'
ORDER BY
  product_name;Code language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

In this tutorial, you have learned how to use the Oracle LTRIM() function to remove unwanted characters from the left end of a string.