Question

basically I have a string being passed to a variable.. say

@MyParameter =     "Flower Beer Dog" 

so what i want to do is to find all the records that contain “Flower”, “Beer” or “Dog”

Somehing like if I said

select * from myTable where myColumn = 'Flower' or myColumn = 'Beer' or myColumn = 'Dog'

but the thing is that I am getting it in the @MyParameter and I am not sure how to split it and and convert it into the query above

Answer 1

This returns a table that displays your delimited string as seperate fields instead. I.e.: “Flower Beer Dog” becomes
Flower
Beer
Dog

The function uses commas to delimit instead of spaces, but you can change that part if you need to.

CREATE Function [dbo].[ParseStringList]  (@StringArray nvarchar(max) )  
Returns @tbl_string Table  (ParsedString nvarchar(max))  As  

BEGIN 

DECLARE @end Int,
        @start Int

SET @stringArray =  @StringArray + ',' 
SET @start=1
SET @end=1

WHILE @end<Len(@StringArray)
    BEGIN
        SET @end = CharIndex(',', @StringArray, @end)
        INSERT INTO @tbl_string 
            SELECT
                Substring(@StringArray, @start, @end-@start)

        SET @start=@end+1
        SET @end = @end+1
    END

RETURN
END

Then you use it like this:

SELECT * 
FROM table
WHERE searchfield In (Select ParsedString From dbo.ParseStringList(@StringArray))