Question

I’m trying to extract monetary sums stored in some poorly formated xml columns (there is no schema defined for the XML column which I guess is part of the problem). I’m getting a conversion error whenever I encounter a node with 0 as its value.

Example:

select xml.value('sum(/List/value)', 'numeric') sum
from (select cast('<List><value>1</value><value>2</value></List>' as xml) xml) a

gives the sum 3 while:

select xml.value('sum(/List/value)', 'numeric') sum
from (select cast('<List><value>0</value><value>0</value></List>' as xml) xml) a

raises the error: “Error converting data type nvarchar to numeric.”

Any idea how I can make my query return 0 when summing up a list of zero-valued nodes?

Answer 1

Your comment suggests an answer to your problem.

Instead of converting to numeric, convert to float. Scientific notation will convert to float.