Question

I have a string of email recipients in the format like this:

 DECLARE @recipients VARCHAR(MAX);  ....  PRINT @recipients;  /* the result  [e-mail];[e-mail];[e-mail];...  */ 

‘SELECT DISTIECT …’ is a simple and powerful SQL statement, but it works against a table. Is there a simple way to select distinct recipient from the recipient list variable like FOR loop in C# or Ruby?

 FOR @recipient IN @recipients  BEGIN     -- send email to @recipient  END 

By the way, I am using TSQL in SQL server 2005.

Answer 1

Here’s a solution for you that uses a temporary table.

declare @emails varchar(2000) set @emails = '[e-mail];[e-mail];[e-mail];'  declare @results table (row int identity(1,1), email varchar(500))  while ((select charindex(';',@emails)) > 0) begin        insert into @results select substring(@emails,1,charindex(';',@emails))     select @emails = substring(@emails,charindex(';',@emails)+1,len(@emails)) end  select distinct email from @results 

The idea is to continously parse the email from the string, insert it into a temporary table, and remove the parsed email from the remaining string.

You can use loop through the temporary table afterward to send your individual emails.