That'll work!!! I would have done it with a CROSS-APPLY like this, but for re-use an inline table valued function would be sweet. If anyone is interested, there is an monster discussion about about SQL vs. CLR text parsing here.

declare @count int

set @count = 5

DECLARE @temp1 TABLE (ID INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED, TextDescription VARCHAR(255))

INSERT INTO @temp1

SELECT 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.' UNION ALL

SELECT 'Nullam a libero et dui tristique malesuada.' UNION ALL

SELECT 'Donec ultricies sollicitudin magna, eu gravida lectus fringilla ut.' UNION ALL

SELECT 'Nunc vestibulum elit tincidunt velit pellentesque feugiat.' UNION ALL

SELECT 'Aliquam eu purus a neque fringilla porta.' UNION ALL

SELECT 'Fusce pretium justo vitae mauris tempor porttitor tincidunt orci laoreet.'

;with tally (N) as

(select row_number() over(order by (select null)) from master.sys.all_columns)

select id, left(textDescription,N-1) as sub_string

from @temp1

cross apply (select Row_Number() over (order by N) as X, N

from tally

where substring(textDescription,N,1) = ' '

and N <= len(textDescription)

) ca

where ca.X = @count