Question

I have a sql dump file from MySQL that I use to create SQL Server (2005) tables out of.

I need to change the column declarations that are greater than varchar(8000), the max for sql server 2005, to varchar(max).

I am using a Visual Basic script to parse through the dump file and make these changes. It just looks at the whole file as a string. I only want to change if the number is greater than 8000, but I don’t know how to do this. Is there a way to check what that number is inside of the declaration and change it? I’ve made a regular expression to find the number inside the declaration. But I don’t know of a way to say:

For all strings that match varchar(int>8000), change to varchar(max).

Answer 1

Regex to match a number greater than (or equal to) 8000: /^([89]\d{3}|\d{5,})$/

Where / is a delimiter for the regex, followed by start (^) followed by either ((...|...)) an 8 or 9 and 3 more digits ([89]\d{3}) or five or more digits (\d{5,}) followed by the end of the string ($) and regex delimiter (/).

To use in your context, something like this should do it…

/varchar\(\s*([89]\d{3}|\d{5,})\s*\)/

This has escaped braces \(...\) and optional spaces \s* and your keyword varchar