I have a table with data that I want to output using the spool command. The output file is required to have an exact amount of whitespaces after the data. For example, the first 3 fields are defined as: firstname varchar2(15) middlename varchar2(15) lastname varchar2(25) 'John James Doe' is the first record. I need to spool that data with trailing blank spaces described below: John(11 blank spaces)James(10 blank spaces)Doe(22 blank spaces) Any help would be appreciated. -Thanh

A spool was typically a device to buffer output until it could be printed. Therefore normally it would hold the formatted output of the report. It seems what you want to do is spool the data file to another data file. A simple program could be written to output a temporary file of the proper format. Or a database application could read and use the data directly.