• You are not going to be able to return a variant data type.

    If your RETURN VARCHAR(255) then that will be the data type for each column that you use the function on.

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

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    http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQLServerCentral/66909/