Select statement not showing whitespace

[Max-crosskey]

Describe the bug

Select statement doesn't include leading blanks in character field, for example if the field has value ' X' then the select and generated insert statement becomes 'X'-

To Reproduce

Insert leading blanks into a character field, then do select from DB2 for i Extension.

Expected behavior

Would expect the return statement to include leading blanks and be ' X'

Screenshots

VSC:
select

insert

STRSQL:

Environment

• OS: Windows 10
• Extension Version 1.7.0

Other

Thought it might be a setting for the job but couldn't find it so apologies if I'm just blind

[worksofliam]

Similar to #256.

@ThePrez is there something in the Mapepire that is trimming spaces from string fields?

[dferrand]

I think there are two reasons why we don't see those whitespaces:

1/ It looks like Mapepire does trim white spaces, I suspect it is the

.trim()

on the

cellDataForResponse = cellData.toString().trim();

line in BlockRetrievableRequest.java.
Trimming trailing whitespaces might make sense for fixed length fields since they convey no information. I think they should be kept for varying length fields (even if SQL ignores them for comparisons, they are technically different values).
Leading whitespaces should never be trimmed.

2/ Even if the whitespaces were not trimmed by Mapepire, the result is displayed in a div in a td where the default html behavior will be to trim leading whitespaces (and collapse multiple whitespaces for that matter). This can be solved here with css (white-space: pre;).