Question

Alright I have something like this(I messed it up…) –

Id Name                     City
1  XXX - New                Plano
2  XXX - XXX - New1         Dallas
3  XXX - XXX - XXX - New2   Sacramento
4  XXX - New3               Houston
5  XXX - XXX - New4         Austin

So, I want to replace all the occurrence with more that one XXX prefix to just 1. For e.g id 2 should have Name=XXX - New2. How would go about achieving this ? Even a query basically to check for a prefix and replace it with the name would work I think and then I can add the prefix again ? I mean set all the records just to say New,New2..so on…and then I can add XXX prefix to it ?

Answer 1

You can remove all instances of ‘XXX – ‘ with the string replace function.

UPDATE tableName
SET Name = Replace(Name, 'XXX - ', '')

Alternately, to keep a single instance you could use:

UPDATE tableName
SET Name = 'XXX - ' + Replace(Name, 'XXX - ', '')
WHERE CHARINDEX('XXX - ', Name) > 0