Question

I have two tables with the following information :

Products

Name  |    ID   |   

Name contains a short string indicating the name, and language of the row.

Languages

Language   |   ID   |

Language would be the same substring contained within the Name column above.

What I would like to do is add a column to my Products table called LanguageID.

I would then extract the substring indicating the language from the Name column, and do a case-insensitive comparison to the Language column in the Languages table. Where a match is found, I would like to insert the ID value from the Languages table into the newly created LanguageID column, creating a foreign key relationship.

So, for example in my Products Table, I have :

Name                  |   ID
Product 1 - enGlIsh   |   1

In my Languages table, I have :

Language    |   ID
English     |   77

So what I would like to end up with in my Products table is :

Name                   |   ID   |   LanguageID
Product 1 - enGlIsh    |   1    |    77

I have written a regEx to return the Language from my substring, I am not sure how I can use it and structure this query in SQL server, however. How can I do this ?

Here is the Regex :

Regex regEx = new Regex(@"(.+\s*-\s*.+\s*-\s*.+)\s*-\s*(\w{1,3}\s*-\s*\w{1,3})\s*-\s*.+");
                string language = regEx.Match(   NAME   ).Groups[2].Value.ToString(); 

Answer 1

No need for a regexp;

create table Languages(id int identity(1,1), language varchar(32) )

Get a list of languages (assumes the format is <anything><space><language_name>):

insert Languages
    select distinct 
       right(name,charindex(' ', reverse(name), 1)-1) as [language]
    from products

Then you can go back and replace/update as needed using the same expression to get the language name.