Question

I need help with the following query. I want to put a condition on the returned value of select command which is an integer between 0 and any number.

DECLARE @month varchar(50);
set @month ='01-03-05-07-09-11'; <---  clarification: these are all months

Declare @cur_month int;
set @cur_month = Month(GetDate());

select charindex(str(@cur_month), @month);

I essentially want

If ( select charindex(str(@cur_month), @month))
    // successful

I get error

An expression of non-boolean type specified in a context where a
condition is expected, near ‘print’.

I tried CAST and CONVERT but to no Avail. As you can see, I am trying to see if the current month is in my @month field, I want to execute certain actions if it is.

Answer 1

Taking the answer from @PaulStock with a couple tweaks will work better.

Changes from PaulStock’s answer

• Left pad for leading zeros. 2 != 02 and wouldn’t match.
• Add hyphens at the beginning and end of the string so each value is in the form -XX- I included this in case you realize you won’t be having the leading zeros. If you’ll always have leading zeros you won’t need this.

Actual code

DECLARE @month VARCHAR(50);
set @month ='03-05-12-09';

set @month = '-' + @month + '-'

IF CHARINDEX('-' + right('00' + CAST(MONTH('2/13/2011') AS VARCHAR), 2) + '-', @month) > 0
    PRINT 'exists'
ELSE 
    PRINT 'does not exist'