This is a real-world problem that I came across the other day. In a reporting scenario, I wanted to output a number of values in an easy, human-readable way for a report. But just making a long, comma-separated string of numbers doesn’t really make it very readable. This is particularly true when there are hundreds of values.
So here’s a powerful pattern to solve that task.
This week’s post is a requirement that I see very regularly as a developer. You get a plaintext string containing one or more ranges. Each range is comma delimited, and the start and end values of the range are separated by a dash. The string could look something like this, for example: 100-120,121-499,510,520,790-999.
Wouldn’t it be practical if we could construct a table value function that returns one row for each range, with columns for the start and end of each range?
Today’s post illustrates a pretty cool application of SQL Server’s built-in XML and XQuery support, used to parse parenthesis-delimited expressions. You may want to get your reading glasses on for this one..
A while ago, I needed to create a URL encoding function in T-SQL. URL encoding is what happens when you translate special characters (basically anything that isn’t an alphanumerical) so they’ll fit in a URL.
There are three different perspectives when you look at a T-SQL statement; the way it’s written, the way it’s evaluated, and the way it’s executed. They’re all important to understand, for different reasons.
A lot of times, T-SQL queries aren’t just for compiling huge sets of aggregate calculations or advanced joins and indexing strategies. Sometimes, you need the skills and tools to do some basic string parsing. Here, you’ll learn the most common basic string parsing and functions found in T-SQL.
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