Question

… Well, not exactly only for PRINT. I need to assign a string variable the value that mixes explicit substrings with integer values (and possibly with other type values). The goal is to get the string for logging.

So far, I use the code like:

DECLARE @msg nvarchar(1000)
...
SET @msg = @procname + 'result = ' + CAST(@result AS nvarchar(5))
                     + '; error = ' + CAST(@error AS nvarchar(5))

where the @procname is a string like sp_my_proc:, and the @result and the @error are integer variables. The result should look like (no extra spaces around the numbers, just the minimum length):

sp_my_proc: result = 3; error = 0

The above approach works, but… Is there any better way for converting an integer variable to the string than CAST(@result AS nvarchar(5))? (Consider the magic number 5 being a minor detail to be ignored.)

How do you solve the problem of generating such strings in your code?

Thanks, Petr

Answer 1

In SQL-Server you can use STR() function
http://msdn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/library/ms189527.aspx
The default value for ‘length’ parameter is 10. Since an integer variable is never longer than 10 symbols (you’d have an overflow) this will always work without errors:

declare @test int
set @test = 333333333
select STR(@test)

Also, take a look at
String.Format like functionality in T-SQL?