mysql, space equals empty string

Question

Just took me 2 hours to troubleshoot an issue on my backend.

Cause was that of empty string being equal to space:

SELECT \' \' = \'\';
-> 1

SELEC         


        

Answer 1

Not a vanilla MySQL user, but I was having this problem with MariaDB 10.2.9 as well. I solved it by changing my VARCHAR column collation from utf8mb4_unicode_ci to utf8mb4_unicode_nopad_ci.

SELECT '' = ' ' COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
Result: 1

SELECT '' = ' ' COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_nopad_ci;
Result: 0