You have definitely peaked my interest with this one. I've been playing with adapting Jeff Moden's DelimitedSplit8K function covered in the article at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Tally+Table/72993, but I don't have your solution yet. I'm running into the case where multiple trailing spaces is killing it. Then there's the matter of allowing for more than one delimiter at once. :w00t: I don't know if I'm running down a rabbit hole with no hope here, but it is definitely cool stuff. 😀

I'm curious as to the performance when using the XML approach versus the tally table approach, so please post your performance testing results.