Question

Here’s the situation I’m in: We have a field in our database that contains a 3 digit number, surrounded by some text. This number is actually a PK in another table, and I need to extract this out so I can implement a proper FK relationship. Here’s an example of what would currently reside in the column:

Some Text Goes Here - (305) Followed By Some More Text

So, what I’m looking to do is extract the ‘305’ from the column, and hopefully end up with a result that looks something like this (pseudo code)

SELECT
   <My Extracted Value>,
   Original Column Text,
   Id
FROM dbo.MyTable

It seems to me that using a Regex match in my query is the most effective way to do this. Can anybody point me in the right direction?

EDIT: We’re using SQL Server 2005

Answer 1

This is based on Pranay’s first answer that has since been changed.

DECLARE @NumStr varchar(1000)
SET @NumStr = 'Some Text Goes Here - (305) Followed By Some More Text';
SELECT SUBSTRING(@NumStr,PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9]%',@NumStr),3)

Returns 305