select problems

[Alexander Bradley]

Hi,

I am having some trouble with selecting info from one of my tables.
The table is called "countries" and the relevant column is "continent".

If i use the following select statement, no records are returned.

select * from countries where continent='europe'

However, if i use;

select * from countries where continent like 'europe%'

then the appropriate records are returned. I cant understand this as when i look at the data, there is nothing after the last letter in "europe". No trailing spaces ... nothing!

If it is relevant, i imported the data from a file where this column was the last in the line. The datatype is varchar(50).

Any thoughts would be very much appreciated.

Regards

Sandy