thanks for the good explanation of everything! 🙂

hopefully just one more question, and i will be done.

according to your example ( which is much easier to read ) than my previous post...

could i simply replace the 'first,last' with the column name which has the string values?

i just tried it like this:

declare @String varchar(100);

select @String = 'MyColumn'

select left(@String, charindex(',', @String)-1),

right(@String, len(@String)-charindex(',', @String))

from [MyTable]

then i get a SUBSTRING error message which is weird cause i don't see the SUBSTRING function

in there at all.

Msg 536, Level 16, State 5, Line 5

Invalid length parameter passed to the SUBSTRING function.