Question

I have a column that looks like:

Column A

1A
2B
5Z

Essentially, I need to replace the letter part with the correspending number in the alphabet. LIke:

Column A

1.1
2.2
5.26

I was thinking of creating a “lookup” table to retrieve the correspnding letter number but wanted to see if there is a more elegant/efficient way?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Just give you an algorithm to convert character to number and let parsing characters within a column up to you:

DECLARE @offset int
SET @offset = 64
DECLARE @character char    

-- OUTPUT | A | 1 |
SET @character = 'A'
SELECT @character, ASCII(@character) - @offset

-- OUTPUT | Z | 26 |
SET @character = 'Z'
SELECT @character, ASCII(@character) - @offset