Question

If I have data in which the number of characters before a | are always different how can I write a SELECT statement to get all the characters up to a pipe character?

Sample data:

asdf|adkfdll|dd
asdkdkdk|da|d

Answer 1

;WITH T(C) AS
(
SELECT 'asdf|adkfdll|dd' UNION ALL
SELECT 'asdkdkdk|da|d' UNION ALL
SELECT ''
)
SELECT  LEFT(C, CHARINDEX('|',C + '|') -1)
FROM T