Question

Thank you in advance! I am working in SQL Server 2008 R2.

What I am trying to do is I have a text type column that has a first and last name and then shows a ^, what I want to do is capture that text leading up to the ^ (so essnetially the first and last name) and append it to the very bottom of another column (not replace) within the same table.

I have tried using charindex but I just receieve the index number and I can’t seem to get it to capture the text before the ^ appears, I just get the position of the ^ and also I am having a hard time appending this
text chunk to another text type column within the same table. For this I have been trying the updatetext function but it doesn’t seem to work. I have scrapped what I have tried thus far because I have gotten anywhere without errors.

So in summary:

I need to capture text at the beginning of a text data type column until it reaches a ^ symbol

Save that text to some sort of variable.

Place (append), along with slight additions, into another text data type column.

It seems like it should be simple but I am having a difficult time, Please make recommendations if possible.
Thank you.

Answer 1

First, let’s find the starting position of the ^ in col1:

CHARINDEX('^', col1)

We will then use LEFT to return the left part of the column by specifying the number of characters to return. However, since the ^ is at the starting position, we need to subtract 1.

LEFT(col1, CHARINDEX('^', col1) - 1)

We then use + (CONCAT in 2012+) to concatenate another column (col2) to this:

col2 + LEFT(col1, CHARINDEX('^', col1) - 1)

If you need to make other additions, you can separate the string values using a plus:

'Hello' + ' ' + 'World'

The final statement may look something like:

SELECT col2 + LEFT(col1, CHARINDEX('^', col1) - 1) AS col

Update

If there are some values that do not have a ^, you will need a CASE statement to prevent receiving the “Invalid length parameter passed to the LEFT or SUBSTRING function” error:

SELECT
  CASE
    WHEN CHARINDEX('^', col1) > 0
      THEN LEFT(col1, CHARINDEX('^', col1) - 1)
    ELSE col1
  END AS col