Question

I need to return everything in a string before the space:

select Substring('stack overflow', 1, CharIndex( ' ', 'stack overflow' ) - 1)

this will yield stack

however if we don’t have a space in the data, i would like to return the entire string:

select Substring('stackoverflow', 1, CharIndex( ' ', 'stackoverflow' ) - 1)

i would like that to return stackoverflow

what is the correct way to handle this scenario?

Answer 1

;WITH T(C) AS
(
SELECT 'stack overflow' UNION ALL
SELECT 'stackoverflow'
)
SELECT LEFT(C, CharIndex( ' ', C + ' ' ) - 1)
FROM T