Question

In my table I want to remove first 7 characters from the Title column.

I have a table like below and I want to remove the 'Copy of' prefix:

Title
---------------------
Copy ofthis is tile1
Copy ofthis is another tile2

I tried this:

Update MyTable SET Title=(SELECT RIGHT(Title,LEN(Title)- 7) AS Title) 
  WHERE Title LIKE 'Copy of%'

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You don’t need a subquery for this, and generally you don’t need to check the length to figure out how long the output should be. Assuming this isn’t a varchar(max), you could do:

UPDATE dbo.MyTable
  SET Title = SUBSTRING(Title, 8, 8000)
  WHERE Title LIKE 'Copy of%';

Or you could do:

UPDATE dbo.MyTable
  SET Title = STUFF(Title, 1, 7, '')
  WHERE Title LIKE 'Copy of%';

You may also want to use LTRIM() in case the value is 'Copy of something' and you don’t want a leading space:

UPDATE dbo.MyTable
  SET Title = LTRIM(STUFF(Title, 1, 7, ''))
  WHERE Title LIKE 'Copy of%';