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There are several ways to locate whitespace, special characters, excessive tabs, and carriage returns in text fields using PostgreSQL:

1. Using regular expressions:
2. The regular expression '\s' matches any whitespace character (spaces, tabs, and newlines).
3. The regular expression '[^[:alnum:][:space:]]' matches any non-alphanumeric and non-whitespace character.

Example query:

SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE mytextfield ~ '\s'; -- finds records with any whitespace character in mytextfield SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE mytextfield ~ '[^[:alnum:][:space:]]'; -- finds records with any special character in mytextfield

1. Using the replace() function:
2. The replace() function can be used to remove specific characters from a text field.

Example query:

SELECT replace(mytextfield, E'\t', '') FROM mytable; -- removes all tabs from mytext_field

1. Using the regexp_replace() function:
2. The regexp_replace() function can be used to remove or replace matched patterns in a text field using regular expressions.

Example query:

SELECT regexpreplace(mytextfield, E'[^\w\s]', '', 'g') FROM mytable; -- removes all non-alphanumeric and non-whitespace characters from mytextfield