LTRIM() Function in MySQL

LTRIM() :
This function in MySQL is used to remove leading spaces from a string.

Syntax :

LTRIM(str)

Parameter :
It accepts one parameter as mentioned above and described below as follows.

• str – The string from which we want to remove leading spaces.

Returns :
It returns a string after truncating all leading spaces.

Example-1 :
Removing all the leading spaces of a given string using LTRIM Function.

SELECT '    geeksforgeeks'  As OriginalString,
LTRIM ('    geeksforgeeks')  AS LeftTrimmedString;

Output :

OriginalString	LeftTrimmedString
geeksforgeeks	geeksforgeeks

Example-2 :
Removing all the leading spaces of a given string using LTRIM Function.

SELECT '    MySQL' AS String, 
RTRIM ('MySQL')  AS Tstring;

Output :

String	Tstring
MySQL	MySQL

Example-3 :
LTRIM Function can also be used to remove all the leading spaces of column data. To demonstrate create a table named Employee.

CREATE TABLE Employee
(
 Employee_id INT AUTO_INCREMENT,  
 Employee_name VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
 Joining_Date DATE NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY(Employee_id )
);

Inserting some data to the Employee table :

INSERT INTO Employee
(Employee_name, Joining_Date )
VALUES
 ('     Ananya Majumdar', '2000-01-11'),
 ('   Anushka Samanta', '2002-11-10' ),
 ('   Aniket Sharma ', '2005-06-11' ),
 ('   Anik Das', '2008-01-21'  ),
 ('  Riya Jain', '2008-02-01' ),
 ('    Tapan Samanta', '2010-01-11' ),
 ('   Deepak Sharma', '2014-12-01'  ),
 ('   Ankana Jana', '2018-08-17'),
 ('  Shreya Ghosh', '2020-09-10') ;

So, the Employee Table is as follows.

select * from Employee ;

Output :

Employee_id	Employee_name	Joining_Date
1	Ananya Majumdar	2000-01-11
2	Anushka Samanta	2002-11-10
3	Aniket Sharma	2005-06-11
4	Anik Das	2008-01-21
5	Riya Jain	2008-02-01
6	Tapan Samanta	2010-01-11
7	Deepak Sharma	2014-12-01
8	Ankana Jana	2018-08-17
9	Shreya Ghosh	2020-09-10

Now, we are going to remove all leading spaces from the Employee_name column.

 SELECT  
 Employee_id,  Employee_name,
 LTRIM( Employee_name) AS  TrimmedEname  
 FROM  Employee ;

Output :

Employee_id	Employee_name	TrimmedEname
1	Ananya Majumdar	Ananya Majumdar
2	Anushka Samanta	Anushka Samanta
3	Aniket Sharma	Aniket Sharma
4	Anik Das	Anik Das
5	Riya Jain	Riya Jain
6	Tapan Samanta	Tapan Samanta
7	Deepak Sharma	Deepak Sharma
8	Ankana Jana	Ankana Jana
9	Shreya Ghosh	Shreya Ghosh