Question

If I have a query to return all matching entries in a DB that have ‘news’ in the searchable column (i.e. SELECT * FROM table WHERE column LIKE %news%), and one particular row has an entry starting with ‘In recent World news, Somalia was invaded by …’, can I return a specific ‘chunk’ of an SQL entry? Kind of like a teaser, if you will.

Answer 1

select substring(column,                  CHARINDEX ('news',lower(column))-10,                  20) FROM table  WHERE column LIKE %news% 

basically substring the column starting 10 characters before where the word ‘news’ is and continuing for 20.

Edit: You’ll need to make sure that ‘news’ isn’t in the first 10 characters and adjust the start position accordingly.