Question

is it possible to run an SQL query, with an XPath “where” clause, and to trim trailing spaces before the comparison ?

I have an SQL XML column, in which I have XML nodes with attributes which contain trailing spaces. I would like to find a given record, which has a specified attribute value – without the trailing spaces.

When I try, I get…

“There is no function ‘{http://www.w3.org/2004/07/xpath-functions}:normalize-space()'”

I have tried the following (query 1 works, query 2 doesn’t). This is on SQL 2005.

declare @test table (data xml)
insert into @test values ('<thing xmlns="http://my.org.uk/Things" x="hello " />')

-- query 1
;with xmlnamespaces ('http://my.org.uk/Things' as ns0)
select * from @test where data.exist('ns0:thing[@x="hello "]') != 0

-- query 2
;with xmlnamespaces ('http://my.org.uk/Things' as ns0)
select * from @test where data.exist('ns0:thing[normalize-space(@x)="hello"]') != 0

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

SQL Server also doesn’t include the replace() function which allows regular expressions. You best bet is using contains() which should work for your searches (the nested substring problem won’t exist when you are not using wildcards).

select * from @test where data.exist('ns0:thing[contains(@x, "hello")]') != 0