Question

I have a table that looks like follows:

NAME(varchar(6),  STRING(varchar(250)

ABCD   '1     2     1    173  1      8  9   1     1     2     4    7      1   3.....'
APLC   '1  3 11       34        1  4   99          33     23        111       12   6 7 8....'

the string continues with this up to 250 characters.

What I am trying to do is get the values and there respective positions from this string.

I know I can use Charindex but that gives me only the first position of a number in the string.

e.g.

Select Charindex ('2',STRING) where Name = ABCD

ANSWER = 7

But what I’m looking for is something like a table that have the following in for each Name

Name  Position   Value 
---------------------------    
ABCD,   7,         2
ABCD,   1,         1
ABCD,   13,        1
ABCD,   18,        1
ABCD,   19,        7

Any ideas welcome 🙂

Answer 1

With a little help of a numbers table it could look like this.

select T.Name,
       N.N as Position,
       substring(T.STRING, N.N, 1) as Value
from YourTable as T
  cross apply Numbers as N
where N.N between 1 and 250 and
      substring(T.STRING, N.N, 1) <> ' '

Working sample with table variable and master..spt_values as a numbers table.

declare @T table
(
  NAME varchar(6),
  STRING varchar(250)
)

insert into @T values
('ABCD', '1     2     1    173  1      8  9   1     1     2     4    7      1   3'),
('APLC', '1  3 11       34        1  4   99          33     23        111       12   6 7 8')

;with Numbers(N) as
(
  select Number 
  from master..spt_values
  where type = 'P'
)
select T.Name,
       N.N as Position,
       substring(T.STRING, N.N, 1) as Value
from @T as T
  cross apply Numbers as N
where N.N between 1 and 250 and
      substring(T.STRING, N.N, 1) <> ' '