Importing text file to database - unwanted space characters - tsql

Question

I have a problem with importing data from a text file (comma-delimited and " text qualifier). That's the only type of export we can do from an almost-30-year-old system.
The problem comes from someone in the old system using a "space" in fields, where during import SQL shows me there is something and display cell as "NULL" When you open this text file in Excel it shows empty cell (which is correct) but cell behave differently compared to real empty cells.
Example (that's from Notepad++):
-> Orange Arrows shows TAB (did line them up to be readable)
. orange dots shows spaces
Some Column1 data has extra spaces ("N " and "B " rows) but don't cause a problem.
Column2 - first 8 columns are good. "" nothing between text qualifiers.
Rows 9-13 have space between TEXT Qualifiers. When loaded to Excel cell is empty and looks good. When loading up to SQL Server it has got errors, if I load this from Excel file SQL shows NULL in those cells. Tried to "wash" this with Access, load up good, save dbo and load up this dbo in SQL shows NULL.
Column3 same as Column2: row 1 is good, problem in row 2 and 3, then 4-8 is good showing X, and 9 till 13 shows NULL.
Any ideas how to load this up into SQL Server? Change some settings on column what data inside (to ignore the space)...?

Answer 1

Assuming you want spaces to be converted to empty strings in the database after importing the data, you could run SQL like
UPDATE [yourTableName]
SET [columnName] = ''
WHERE [columnName] = ' ';
Copy-and-paste for however many columns need to be sanitised and put in the correct table name and column names.
If you wanted to remove spaces from the start and end of strings at the same time as changing spaces to empty strings, you could use
UPDATE [yourTableName]
SET [columnName] = LTRIM(RTRIM([columnName]))
which would tidy up the "B " and "N " entries too.