Union Select problem

[Michael Fanning]

I maintain two member databases and need to combine them without duplicates
to send out newsleters. Up to last month this worked fine using the Union
Select statement. This month when I use the same query I don't filter out
any duplicates. The only difference is that one if the tables in the query
was created by importing an .xls file rather than the .csv file I have
previously imported. Could this make a difference? What else could cause
exact duplicate records to appear in the Union Select query?

 

[Alex Dybenko]

Probably you have extra spaces, or some other characters, which are not
visible (tab for example).

 

[Michael Fanning]

How can I identify these extra spaces or invisible characters?
Thanks for your help, Mike

 

[Alex Dybenko]

to cut extra spaces you can use Trim() function