Question

My data looks as follows

MyText
-------
some text, some more text, even more text,,
some text,,,,
some text, some text,,,
some text, some more text, even more, yet more, and again

I would like to achieve:

MyText
-------
some text, some more text, even more text
some text
some text, some text
some text, some more text, even more, yet more, and again

How can I remove the commas at the end of the lines? I must retain the commas between items, but I need to remove any from the end

I need to do this within a select statement, and I haven’t been able to find a solution of applying a RegEx without writing a function (Which I would prefer to avoid)

I have one solution, but its particulary dirty and I would like to improve it. I’m using a set of nested REPLACE to replace 4 commas with 3, 3 with 2, and 2 with one, then remove the end one

Any ideas?

EDIT: Data is coming from an external system, so I have no control over that, otherwise I’d concatenate with commas correctly in the first instance. This statement I’m using will be run on SQL Server 2005

Answer 1

Try something like this

DECLARE @Table TABLE(
        Val VARCHAR(MAX)
)

INSERT INTO @Table (Val)  SELECT 'some text, some more text, even more text,,'
INSERT INTO @Table (Val)  SELECT 'some text,,,,'
INSERT INTO @Table (Val)  SELECT 'some text, some text,,,'
INSERT INTO @Table (Val)  SELECT 'some text, some more text, even more, yet more, and again'

SELECT  Val,
        REVERSE(SUBSTRING(  REVERSE(Val),   PATINDEX('%[A-Za-z0-9]%',REVERSE(Val)), LEN(VAL) - (PATINDEX('%[A-Za-z0-9]%',REVERSE(Val)) - 1) ) ),
        *
FROM    @Table