Eliminating spaces in query output

Is there a way that I can do a select statement that will just select the text within a field. ie. If the field is 200 wide, but the actual text is only 20 characters, can I select JUST the 20 characters with nothing else? I need to do this for a huge number of rows ....

Also, I'm running the select statement via osql if that helps.When selecting the column name you can use the trim function, e.g.

select rtrim(ltrim(emp_name))
from employees

This will trim blank spaces from the left and right hand ends of the character string. If you only need to clear trailing blanks just use the rtrim function.|||RTRIM was just what I needed, thank you.