Question

I need to split a pipe-delimited field (‘Y|N|Y|Y’).

I found the recursive function listed here
T-SQL: Opposite to string concatenation – how to split string into multiple records

but it creates the values into new records.

row   field
 1      Y
 2      N
 3      Y
 4      N

I need to transform ‘Y|N|Y|Y’

field
'Y|N|Y|Y' 

into

field1  |  field2  | field3  | field4
    y         N         Y        N

Can someone point me in the right direction? Would it make it easier if I said the number of values is fixed (it will probably be 8 values delimited in one field).

Update: A possible field value could be this (note the blank value):
‘Y|10|N|1||Y’

Answer 1

**EDIT: **Mine still works for the sample string

Here’s an alternative answer, since you know the widths are a fixed length:

DECLARE @myString AS nvarchar(20) = 'Y|10|N|1||Y'

;WITH cte
AS
(
SELECT
    KeyCol = @@IDENTITY,
    CONVERT(XML,'<i>' + REPLACE(@myString, '|', '</i><i>') + '</i>') AS delimited_str
)
SELECT 
    [1] AS Field1,
    [2] AS Field2,
    [3] AS Field3,
    [4] AS Field4,
    [5] AS Field5,
    [6] AS Field6,
    [7] AS Field7,
    [8] AS Field8
FROM(
    SELECT 
        KeyCol,
        ROW_NUMBER() OVER (partition by KeyCol order by KeyCol)as col_nbr,
        x.i.value('.', 'VARCHAR(50)') AS delimited_VAL
    FROM cte
    CROSS APPLY delimited_str.nodes('//i') AS x(i)
    ) as PivotedDataTable
PIVOT
(MAX(delimited_VAL) FOR col_nbr IN
([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8])
) AS PivotTable;

EDIT: I knew I saw this somewhere before when I came across a similar problem:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/transactsql/thread/381e4164-f1e0-4b54-828f-2795d2cdcb3e/