Conver Number to string ( exp. 9 - 0009 or 9 - 09)

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item Conver Number to string ( exp. 9 - 0009 or 9 - 09)

  • How about

    RIGHT(REPLICATE('0',@size) + CAST(@value as varchar(max)),@size)

  • mak101 (7/2/2015)


    How about

    RIGHT(REPLICATE('0',@size) + CAST(@value as varchar(max)),@size)

    I was thinking the same thing (maybe not varchar(max) though ;-))

    "I cant stress enough the importance of switching from a sequential files mindset to set-based thinking. After you make the switch, you can spend your time tuning and optimizing your queries instead of maintaining lengthy, poor-performing code."

    -- Itzik Ben-Gan 2001

  • Wouldn't it be better to use something like this:

    SELECT RIGHT(REPLACE(STR(@NUM),' ','0'),5)

    Reference:

    http://stackoverflow.com/a/779142/245764

  • Or

    [font="Courier New"]REPLACE(STR(@NUM, 5),' ','0')[/font]

  • Agree with using REPLICATE instead, and get rid of any extraneous local variables, so fully coded would look like this:

    CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[NumberToString] (

    @value int,

    @size int

    )

    RETURNS varchar(20)

    AS

    BEGIN

    RETURN (

    SELECT RIGHT(REPLICATE('0', @size) + CAST(@value AS varchar(20)), @size)

    )

    END

    SQL DBA,SQL Server MVP(07, 08, 09) A socialist is someone who will give you the shirt off *someone else's* back.

  • Good solution Mak - clean, easy to inline so no udf performance hit - interesting if there are any counter points/other ideas

    Tom in Sacramento For better, quicker answers on T-SQL questions, click on the following...http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/

  • Again I wonder how they choose a "Featured Script". Is this "featured" as an anti-pattern? I guess that I assume something is featured to show a best practice. Not worst.

    A loop adding zeroes to the front might not be the absolute worst way. I suppose one could concoct something worse. But this is pretty bad.

    Then there is the lack of comments and this:

    DECLARE @Tmp VARCHAR (128);

    SET @Tmp = CAST(@value AS VARCHAR(20));

    An INT can go from -2147483648 to 2147483647. 10+1 characters. No guard for negatives, so call it 10. But why put a length at all? CAST(@value as VARCHAR). If one were to use this technique at all that is.

    Assuming that passing in a NULL for @value should result in a string of zeroes is at least worthy of a comment? Yes? IMHO the behavior would be more consistent with the rest of SQL if NULL passed in for @value would return NULL or an error. NULL operation anything s/b NULL.

    If I wanted to get real nit-picky I'd even ask why int is lower case for one parameter-type and INT is upper case for the other. But that is straying into obsessive compulsive grammar Nazi territory. Even if it is a good idea for a best practice to be consistent.

    For SQL 2012 and later I would suggest: RETURN FORMAT(@value,REPLICATE('0',@size)). It will fail for @value=NULL but the rest of the cruft just goes away.

  • gshouse (7/22/2015)

    If I wanted to get real nit-picky I'd even ask why int is lower case for one parameter-type and INT is upper case for the other. But that is straying into obsessive compulsive grammar Nazi territory. Even if it is a good idea for a best practice to be consistent.

    Actually not nit-picky. You should always use lower case, because there are times SQL Server errors out when trying to process upper case data type names!

    SQL DBA,SQL Server MVP(07, 08, 09) A socialist is someone who will give you the shirt off *someone else's* back.

  • Well clearly there are a variety of ways to do this.

  • There must be a few ways to do this. Which would be quicker though...

    The original article's loop or this:

    "SELECT RIGHT(REPLICATE('0', @size) + CAST(@value AS varchar(20)), @size)"

    I'm guessing the latter would run circles around a loop, specially for millions of rows.

    Michael Gilchrist
    Database Specialist
    There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those that don't. 😀

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