Question

I have a SQL statement,

select ColumnName from Table

And I get this result,

Error 192.168.1.67 UserName 0bce6c62-1efb-416d-bce5-71c3c8247b75 An existing ....

So anyway the field has a lot of stuff in it, I just want to get out the ‘UserName’.

Can I use a regex for that?

I mean it would be kind of like this,

select SUBSTRING(ColumnName, 0, 5) from Table

Except the SUBSTRING would be replaced with a regex of some kind. I am comfortable with regex, but I am not sure how to apply it in this case, or even if you can.

If I could get this working it would be great because I plan to pull the data into a temporary table, and do some quite complicated things matching it with other tables etc. If I can get this all working it would save me writing a C# app to do it with.

Thanks.

Answer 1

No, out of the box, SQL Server doesn’t support regexs.

You could retrofit those by means of a SQL-CLR assembly that you deploy into SQL Server.