Question

Using SQL I’d like to return all text before the 3rd forward slash in a column

so

/one/two/three/whatever/testing

would return:

/one/two/three

Any quick and dirty way to do this in SQL (specifically MS T-SQL under MS SQL 2005+) ?

Answer 1

Since you said “quick and dirty”, I’m assuming that this very quick and very dirty solution won’t receive a bunch of down votes. The SQL below uses multiple SUBSTRING() functions to find the third slash:

DECLARE @str VARCHAR(50)
SET @str = '/one/two/three/whatever/testing'
SELECT SUBSTRING(@str, 0, CHARINDEX('/', @str, CHARINDEX('/', @str, CHARINDEX('/', @str, CHARINDEX('/', @str, 0) + 1) + 1) + 1))

You can see a working example here.