[snip] > Or if there are also blanks among those e-mail addresses: > > SELECT first_name,work_email FROM tb_contacts WHERE > tb_contacts.work_email IS NOT NULL AND tb_contacts.work_email != ''; The "tb_contacts.work_email IS NOT NULL" clause is superfluous, the other condition will evaluate to false for null email anyway: a null compared with any operator to any value is always null, which fails the comparison. Generally any operator involving a null always results in null, except a few special operators like "IS NULL" and some others. In fewer words, the original statement will filter out both null and empty string emails, but not emails with one or more space characters in them. For example " " will be selected, but for a human it still looks blank. I wonder what data type you have, cause e.g. if you have char(n), that will be padded automatically with space characters (see http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/datatype-character.html). I you do have space characters in the email field, you could use: trim(both from tb_contacts.work_email) != '' or char_length(trim(both from tb_contacts.work_email)) != 0 See also: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/functions-string.html This should filter out all null, empty string, and only space emails. HTH, Csaba. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
