Question

I have a select statement where I want to take 100 characters from a field. Is there an easy way to do this?

Here is some pseudo code below.

Select substring(0, 100, longField)
from myTable

Answer 1

You’ve got it. Use the SUBSTRING() method. This will work on any string/character/binary/image datatypes.

DECLARE @str varchar(1000);
SELECT @str = 'foobar-booz-baz-cowboys';

SELECT SUBSTRING (@str, 0, 10);   
-- returns foobar-boo

--from a table:  
SELECT SUBSTRING(CustomerName,0,100)
FROM   MyTable;