Question

I am trying to determine the word frequency in a column that is a VARCHAR(3000). I am not sure if this is the best data type but the table creation was not in hand. In any case, I have been using the following function (taken from here) to split strings up until this point:

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.Split
(
    @RowData nvarchar(2000),
    @SplitOn nvarchar(5)
)  
RETURNS @RtnValue table 
(
    Id int identity(1,1),
    Data nvarchar(100)
) 
AS  
BEGIN 
    Declare @Cnt int
    Set @Cnt = 1

    While (Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)>0)
    Begin
        Insert Into @RtnValue (data)
        Select 
            Data = ltrim(rtrim(Substring(@RowData,1,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)-1)))

        Set @RowData = Substring(@RowData,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)+1,len(@RowData))
        Set @Cnt = @Cnt + 1
    End

    Insert Into @RtnValue (data)
    Select Data = ltrim(rtrim(@RowData))

    Return
END

Usage was as follows:

SELECT s FROM dbo.Split(' ', @description)

It has been working very nicely but now I am getting an error:

The statement terminated. The maximum
recursion 100 has been exhausted
before statement completion.

Does anyone have suggestions on what is a good way of achieving this?

Answer 1

Never mind. Just in case someone else faces the same problem, the following from here works perfect on large strings:

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.SplitLarge(@String varchar(8000), @Delimiter char(1))     
returns @temptable TABLE (items varchar(8000))     
as     
begin     
    declare @idx int     
    declare @slice varchar(8000)     

    select @idx = 1     
        if len(@String)<1 or @String is null  return     

    while @idx!= 0     
    begin     
        set @idx = charindex(@Delimiter,@String)     
        if @idx!=0     
            set @slice = left(@String,@idx - 1)     
        else     
            set @slice = @String     

        if(len(@slice)>0)
            insert into @temptable(Items) values(@slice)     

        set @String = right(@String,len(@String) - @idx)     
        if len(@String) = 0 break     
    end 
return     
end