Question

Using SQL Server 2008, I am trying to do something similar to this post regarding splitting a concatenated field into separate parts for normalization purposes.

The problem with the solutions in the linked post is that they only work for delimited values.

The data I am attempting to split would be similar to:

UserID — ConcatField
1 — ABC
2 — DEF

I would want the output to be like:

UserID — ConcatField
1 — A
1 — B
1 — C
2 — D
2 — E
2 — F

Is there a function to split out these values without the use of a delimiter?

Answer 1

Is this what you mean?

WITH X AS
(
SELECT 1 AS UserID,'ABC' AS ConcatField UNION ALL
SELECT 2 AS UserID,'DEF' AS ConcatField
), N AS
     (SELECT 1 i
     UNION ALL
     SELECT i+1
     FROM   N
     WHERE  i<1000 /*Or whatever your max string length is*/
     )

SELECT UserID,SUBSTRING(ConcatField,i,1) as ConcatField
 INTO #NewTemporaryTable
 FROM X JOIN N  ON I<= LEN(ConcatField)
OPTION(MAXRECURSION 0)

Gives

UserID      ConcatField
----------- -----------
1           A
1           B
1           C
2           D
2           E
2           F

Edit: Though as Jeff Moden points out in the comments the performance of recursive CTEs is far from great so you would be best off creating a permanent numbers table using one of the techniques from here and then using

SELECT  UserID ,
        SUBSTRING(ConcatField, i, 1) AS ConcatField
INTO    #NewTemporaryTable
FROM    YourTable
        JOIN Numbers ON Number <= LEN(ConcatField)