Find rows in which the column doesn't contain a "space" I'm using Postgres 9.5.  I want to search for rows in which my name column does not contain a space.  I'm a little murky on how to define a space to you, though. I thought it would just be the space bar on my keyboard, so I ran:

.... where name not like '% %';


but then I got some results like this:

 | JASON FALKNER


That sure looks like a space to me, but there are probably some other things going on. Is there a better way I can scan for rows in which my name column doesn't contain a space?

Using a regexp, not (name ~ '\s') still returned columns that looked like they had a space.

Using:

select cast(name as bytea) ... where name not like like '% %';


returned:

\x4a41534f4ec2a0424c414b45


However, I'm still a little unclear how I use that data to figure out how to screen spaces from my results.

I tried where not (name ~ '[[:space:]]')' and it's returning "JASON BLAKE" with the same byte sequence above, \x4a41534f4ec2a0424c414b45.
I suggest you provide explicitly the characters you want to be considered as "white space" and excluded to a regex:

where name !~ '[ \t\v\b\r\n\u00a0]'


Characters:

\s         white space (space, \r, \n, \t, \v, \f)
' '        space
\t         (horizontal) tab
\v         vertical tab
\b         backspace
\r         carriage return
\n         newline
\f         form feed
\u00a0     non-breaking space
---


See the docs for pattern matching.

In your example, note that \xC2A0 is the UTF-8 representation of Non breaking space (00A0).