You say: "Oops. Oracle pads some of these fields by default so that reports will be lined up and neat. We'll have to trim the strings ourselves."
Not quite: one can use FM modifier in format string to instruct Oracle to trim whitespace from resulting string automatically, like this:
SQL> select to_char(sysdate,'Day, Month DD, YYYY') from dual;
TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'DAY,MONTHDD,
-----------------------------
Monday , May 22, 2006
SQL> select to_char(sysdate,'FMDay, Month DD, YYYY') from dual;
TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'FMDAY,MONTHD
-----------------------------
Monday, May 22, 2006
Note that FM is a switch - second FM in format string negates the effect of the first.