Bill couldn't you just concatenate the fields together with your delimiter between.
e.g. select fld1||'|'||fld2||'|'||fld3 I think the trimspool is just trailing blanks so unless you made that the last field output you'll get this behaviour. Iain Nicoll -----Original Message----- Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 4:19 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Howdy, I am spooling my sqlplus output to a file with no headings and all the fields separated by a delimiter. I have a field that is defined as varchar2(56), but typically only 4 or 5 bytes are filled. Oracle recognizes that and if you select length(fld1) from the table, you will get 4. But if I spool this to a file, I always get the full 56 bytes padded with blanks. In other words, I get 4 bytes of data and 52 blanks for that field. I only want the four valid bytes so that my delimiter comes immediately after that 4th byte. My sqlplus options are as follows: set newpage 0 space 0 linesize 5000 pagesize 0 echo off recsep off feedback off heading off trimspool on colsep "|" Bill Carle AT&T Database Administrator 816-995-3922 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Carle, William T (Bill), ALCAS INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Nicoll, Iain \(Calanais\) INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).