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Dan Croak
Dan Croak

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at dancroak.com

Postgres concat_ws() function

Postgres provides a concat_ws() string function with this signature:

concat_ws(sep text, str "any" [, str "any" [, ...] ])
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Consider a schema where the projects.second_user_id and project.third_user_id columns can be NULL:

              Table "public.projects"
     Column     |            Type        | Nullable |
----------------+------------------------+-----------
 id             | bigint                 | not null |
 name           | character varying(255) | not null |
 lead_user_id   | bigint                 | not null |
 second_user_id | bigint                 |          |
 third_user_id  | bigint                 |          |

                Table "public.users"
     Column     |            Type        | Nullable |
----------------+------------------------+-----------
 id             | bigint                 | not null |
 initials       | character varying(255) | not null |
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Consider a query to get the "team" for a project by each user's initials:

SELECT
  projects.name,
  concat_ws(' / ', u1.initials, u2.initials, u3.initials) AS team
FROM
  projects
  LEFT JOIN users u1 ON u1.id = projects.lead_user_id
  LEFT JOIN users u2 ON u2.id = projects.second_user_id
  LEFT JOIN users u3 ON u3.id = projects.third_user_id
GROUP BY
  projects.name,
  team
ORDER BY
  projects.name ASC;
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Example output:

     name     |     team    
-------------------+--------------
Private Beta  | AB / CD
SLA           | EF / GH / IJ
Treasury Ops  | KL
(3 rows)

Time: 1 ms
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Using concat_ws() instead of concat() avoids ugly output like AB / / CD.

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