You can use Binary or as I mentioned BLOB does not have this behavior. The problem with using BINARY for comparison it becomes case sensitive of course and you may get in trouble with using your indexes.

Stripping spaces is good practice however it is yet another step you need to think about.

mysql> SELECT “a ” = “a”;
+————+
| “a ” = “a” |
+————+
| 1 |
+————+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT BINARY “a ” = BINARY “a”;
+————————–+
| BINARY “a ” = BINARY “a” |
+————————–+
| 0 |
+————————–+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I think, however, a best practice would be to have the application strip trailing spaces before insertion. I can’t think of a good reason *not* to do so…

Jay

Check the manual here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/char.html

I’ve tested it myself and storing “a ” to CHAR(10) and reading it back gives “a” and gives LENGTH(col)=1
VARCHAR would read “a ” and LENGTH(col)=2 while both of them will retrieve column with value “a” (no space in the end) if we use WHERE col=”a ” (with space)