Question

I am trying to write a function the will cut off the first 4 chars in a field. For example if the value of the field is ABC_123_EFG it would return 123_EFG. I have tried to use a combination of the LEFT and LEN functions but haven’t had any success.

Here is what I think it should be …

RIGHT(code, LEN(code) - 4) AS code_concat

But it fails with this error

Msg 536, Level 16, State 2, Line 2
Invalid length parameter passed to the RIGHT function.

What am I doing wrong? Is this the best way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Use substring:

 substring(code, 5, 1000)

Or, if it’s a varchar(max):

 substring(code, 5, len(code))