right padding equivalent

Hi everyone,

Please excuse me if this has been asked before or sounds a bit dim.
This is a question asked on another forum but the solutions being
offered are focussing on programming rather than letting the DB server
do the work, which I'm not sure is the most efficient solution.
However, my confession is I dont use SQL server so can't help them
directly with the syntax. Hopefully you can help me help them and learn
a little about SQL Server in the process.

Trying to right pad a first name field so the padded string is a total
of 30 chars. It will be output concatenated with the last name field,
and each field separated with a "|". So that when output it reads
something like:

fname | mylastname


Syntax given was:

select id,
substring((last_name+','+rtrim(' '+isnull(level,'))+'
'+rtrim(isnull(first_name,'))+space(30)),1,30)+ ' | ' as student_name
from student

Issue: It appears this is padding correctly but the spaces are not
rendering in the browser. (I have no way to check this as I don't use
sqlserver. However, I can understand that multiple spaces are not going
to render in the client browser, if indeed the query is padding with
spaces.

Question: Instead of using space(), can replicate() be used and a
unicode space representation rather than an actual space be used? Or,
is there a better way that will ensure
the padding shows in browser?
I guess a fixed width font would also need to be used otherwise the
30-char blocks could wind up being different widths, which would defeat
the purpose.

If there is something I've missed, or you have any suggestions, I'm
keen to learn.

TYhanks in advance,

Lossed

.

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