Question

I have a string with a specific pattern:

23;chair,red [$3]

i.e., a number followed by a semicolon, then a name followed by a left square bracket.

Assuming the semicolon ; always exists and the left square bracket [ always exists in the string, how do I extract the text between (and not including) the ; and the [ in a SQL Server query? Thanks.

Answer 1

Combine the SUBSTRING(), LEFT(), and CHARINDEX() functions.

SELECT LEFT(SUBSTRING(YOUR_FIELD,
                      CHARINDEX(';', YOUR_FIELD) + 1, 100),
                      CHARINDEX('[', YOUR_FIELD) - 1)
FROM YOUR_TABLE;

This assumes your field length will never exceed 100, but you can make it smarter to account for that if necessary by employing the LEN() function. I didn’t bother since there’s enough going on in there already, and I don’t have an instance to test against, so I’m just eyeballing my parentheses, etc.