Strange SSMS Behaviour

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Strange SSMS Behaviour

Samuel Vella

SSCrazy Eights

Points: 8055
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August 25, 2010 at 5:04 am

#239469

I've managed to fix this but I really would like to know what was going on
I had a very simple update query of the form:
update a
set a.col2 = b.col2
from server.db.dbo.table1 a
inner join dbo.table2 b
on a.col1 = b.col1
Which kept giving the error:
Msg 102, Level 15, State 1, Line 4
Incorrect syntax near ' '
To fix it I had to remove all leading white space from the query.
Adding the spaces back in to fix the readability didn't break it again.
So what the hell was going on?

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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HowardW One Orange Chip Points: 29109 More actions · Answer 1

If you still have the query that was causing the error, paste the text into something like Notepad++, then go to view->Show Symbol->Show All Characters.

I'm guessing that there's some strange character in there that can't be displayed by the SSMS GUI.

Samuel Vella SSCrazy Eights Points: 8055 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks for that...

I found this:

select 'weird', ascii(' ')

union all

select 'space',ascii(' ')

returned:

weird160

space 32

So it was a stray ascii 160 character which had somehow got in there.

Stefan_G SSCertifiable Points: 6609 More actions · Answer 3

160 is a non-breaking space.

You very often get such characters if you copy and paste text from the web.

Samuel Vella SSCrazy Eights Points: 8055 More actions · Answer 4

Stefan_G (8/25/2010)
160 is a non-breaking space.
You very often get such characters if you copy and paste text from the web.

I had copied other queries in the same query window from my onenote project which might have introduced certain web attributes.