Question

Here’s the scenario —

I have two tables Names & Sentences:

Names                   Sentences
ID | Names              ID | Description                   
1  | Fox                1  | The <1> jumped over the <2>
2  | Narwhal            2  | The <2> sailed to the <3>
3  | Moon

I need to return all the Descriptions from the Sentences table with the ID replaced with the corresponding Name from the Names table, e.g.

‘The Fox jumped over the Narwhal’, ‘The Narwhal sailed to the Moon’.

I’m stumped at where to begin with this, in theory it appears like a simple problem but my knowledge of manipulating Strings is limited.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks.

Answer 1

This should at least get you started. This is messy to do because you have multiple-level replacements, and no JOIN key in the data itself.

This uses two CROSS JOINs and a bunch of string functions, so it will be very inefficient. This will never run quickly on a large data set.

DECLARE @names table (id int, names varchar(100))
DECLARE @sent table (id int, descr varchar(1000))

INSERT INTO @names
VALUES
(1, 'Fox'),
(2, 'Narwhal'),
(3, 'Moon')

INSERT INTO @sent 
VALUES
(1, 'The <1> jumped over the <2>.'),
(2, 'The <2> sailed to the <3>.')

SELECT DISTINCT Filtered
FROM (SELECT Replace(REPLACE(descr, '<' + CAST(n.id as varchar) + '>', n.names), '<' + CAST(n2.id as varchar) + '>', n2.names) Filtered
      FROM @sent s, @names n, @names n2) x
WHERE Filtered NOT LIKE '%<%'