Question

I have a table in sqlite db called [tblbook] with a column [authors]. What I am trying to do in the sql is to split the author values to firstname and the lastname and sort it on lastname. I did find this great code:

 SELECT substr(BookAuthor, 1, NULLIF(CHARINDEX(' ', BookAuthor) - 1, -1)) AS [FirstName],
   substr(BookAuthor, CHARINDEX(' ', BookAuthor) + 1, LEN(BookAuthor)) AS [LastName]
 FROM tblBook where _id=3

It works perfectly on MSSQL but sqlite doesn’t have the charindex function hence it fails.

Could anyone please be kind and advise me what should be the best approach to achieve this.

Answer 1

Unfortunately this functionality is missing from SQLite:

• http://www.sqlite.org/lang_corefunc.html

• Index of substring in SQLite3?

Maybe you can feed your custom string position function to SQLite using http://www.sqlite.org/c3ref/create_function.html

But if you really need it, there is a complex, ineffective workaround:

http://sqlfiddle.com/#!7/e03a4/3

1: create a numbers table/view

2: join authors to numbers table, and choose the MIN position of the space

3: now you can split the names

SELECT
  substr( name, 1, pos-1) AS first_name,
  substr( name,    pos+1) AS last_name
FROM (
      SELECT
        author.name,
        numbers.x AS pos
      FROM       author
      INNER JOIN numbers
      WHERE substr( author.name, numbers.x, 1) = ' '
      GROUP BY author.name
     ) AS a
ORDER BY last_name;