Question

I am trying to eliminate certain strings from a Description field in a table. To this end I have made this function

---

CREATE FUNCTION fnDescriptionClean 
(@strDescription varchar(50))
RETURNS varchar(50)
AS
BEGIN

declare @Return varchar(50)
declare @badword varchar(50)

set @badword = 'Front'
set @strDescription = CASE 

--Remove from mid string

WHEN @strDescription LIKE '% ' + @Badword +' %'  THEN REPLACE(@strDescription,' ' +  @Badword + ' ',' ')

--Remove from start of string

WHEN @strDescription LIKE @Badword +' %' THEN RIGHT(@strDescription, (len(@strDescription)-(len(@Badword)+1)))

--Remove from end of string

WHEN @strDescription LIKE '% ' + @Badword THEN LEFT(@strDescription, (len(@strDescription)-(len(@Badword)+1)))
ELSE @strDescription END 

set @badword = 'Right'
set @strDescription = CASE 

WHEN @strDescription LIKE '% ' + @Badword +' %'  THEN REPLACE(@strDescription,' ' +  @Badword + ' ',' ')
WHEN @strDescription LIKE @Badword +' %' THEN RIGHT(@strDescription, (len(@strDescription)-(len(@Badword)+1)))
WHEN @strDescription LIKE '% ' + @Badword THEN LEFT(@strDescription, (len(@strDescription)-(len(@Badword)+1)))
ELSE @strDescription END 

RETURN      @strDescription
end

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I am new to SQL programming and would like to improve on this. Supposing I wanted to have a table which contained a list of ‘bad words’ that I wanted to be removed from a string and loop through it when cleaning the description.

I should point out that this process needs to be as efficient as possible as I am dealing with 15 millions records.

Answer 1

Why don’t you just use REPLACE?

UPDATE tableName
SET columnName = REPLACE(columnName,'specific word','');