Question

I need help parsing string of the following pattern for checkin date and checkout date in SQL

'CheckIn: Thursday, April 05, 2012
CheckOut: Saturday, April 07, 2012'

I tried

select 
SUBSTRING([stringToParse], CHARINDEX('Checkin: ', [stringToParse])+9, charindex('<',stringToParse)) as checkin_date,
SUBSTRING([stringToParse], CHARINDEX('CheckOut: ', [stringToParse])+10, LEN([stringToParse])) as checkout_date from xyztable

which works for checkout date but when I use similar approach to parse checkin it returns

'Thursday, April 05, 2012
Chec'

I need to parse checkin date

Answer 1

The third argument to substring() is the length, not the offset. Try this:

select  SUBSTRING([stringToParse], CHARINDEX('Checkin: ', [stringToParse])+9, charindex('< br/>',stringToParse)-11) as checkin_date,
        SUBSTRING([stringToParse], CHARINDEX('CheckOut: ', [stringToParse])+10, LEN([stringToParse])) as checkout_date
from (select 'CheckIn: Thursday, April 05, 2012 < br/>CheckOut: Saturday, April 07, 2012' as stringtoparse
     ) t