This is a continuation of string manipulation techniques. If you are interested, you can read the other articles,
though you do not need to read it before this one. These are mostly beginning
programming articles, but advanced T-SQL programmers may still find something useful here.
- Part 1 deals with SUBSTRING and how it can be used to extract some information
from a field of data
- Part 2 deals with CHARINDEX and how it can be used to extract some information
from a field of data when the data is delimited rather than stored in a particular format.
- Part 3 deals with REPLACE and how it can be used to remove unwanted information
from a field of data when the data is not in a known format.
Introduction
Continuing on with taming strings...
Often when I am reporting data from SQL Server, I am concatenating information together
to form more readable output. Many times this output will also include some numeric data that needs
to be placed inside a string. I am not sure exactly why an integer is not implicitly converted to
a string, but it doesn't work, so I have to use another solution.
The Problem
Numeric values (whether integer or float) are not implicitly converted to characters within a
string concatenation statement. Instead, the following statement (using Northwind):
select customerID + 5 from customers
returns this:
Server: Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Syntax error converting the nvarchar value 'ALFKI' to a column of data type int.
And this code:
select 5 + customerID from customers
still returns this:
Server: Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Syntax error converting the nvarchar value 'ALFKI' to a column of data type int.
Apparently the numeric data type takes some precendence over the character data types. In some
searching of Books Online, I have not found any documentation of this.
In the past I have used CONVERT, and more recently CAST, to convert the numeric data into
character data. However there are a few issues with this technique. Consider the following code:
select quantity, cast( quantity as char( 1)) 'Char_quantity' from [order details]
This results in something that looks like:
quantity Char_quantity -------- ------------- 12 * 10 * 5 5 9 9
Notice that a number of the results are not returned because the data type does
not fit into the space allowed. So what can you do?
In the past, I have usually used code like the following:
select quantity,
rtrim( cast( quantity as varchar( 50))) 'Char_quantity'
from [order details]
This will ensure that I get all results, but still contains some issues.
Suppose that I have a series of decimals like the following:
select 4.35,
12.423,
234.34,
6.3345
which will return:
----- ------- ------- ------- 4.35 12.423 234.34 6.3345
Let us apply the previous formatting to this set of data and see the results.
select rtrim( cast( 4.35 as varchar( 50))),
rtrim( cast( 12.423 as varchar( 50))),
rtrim( cast( 234.34 as varchar( 50))),
rtrim( cast( 6.3345 as varchar( 50)))
------------ -------------- ----------- ----------------
4.35 12.423 234.34 6.3345
I have shortened the result set, but this results in a wide result set in Query Analyzer, though the
actual strings are the proper length.
But what if I need specific formatting? What if I need a specific length for formatting columns
in a report? What if I am looking for xx number of decimals? It is easy to use SUBSTRING and
SPACE to trim and then pad the columns, but this is cumbersome. For the decimals, then you run into
another problem.
select rtrim( cast( round( 4.35, 2) as varchar( 50))),
rtrim( cast( round( 12.423, 2) as varchar( 50))),
rtrim( cast( round( 234.34, 2) as varchar( 50))),
rtrim( cast( round( 6.3345, 2) as varchar( 50)))
------------ ------------ ---------- ----------
4.35 12.420 234.34 6.3300
In this code, the numbers are rounded to the proper number of decimals, but there are
still the original number of characters in the converted strings. SUBSTRING presents a problem
here unless I use CHARINDEX to find the decimal and then perform the proper operations. This gets
cumbersome and I decided to search for an easier solution.
The Solution
I decided to search my handy-dandy Books Online (for those of you with young kids, you
will get the joke. For the rest of you look here)
in the string functions area and I found STR. This is a string function that is designed to
convert numeric values to characters. Let us apply this to our sample data set.
select str( 4.35, 5, 2),
str( 12.423, 5, 2),
str( 234.34, 5, 2),
str( 6.3345, 5, 2)
----- ----- ----- -----
4.35 12.42 234.3 6.33
This almost appears to work, but there are still some issues. Notice that in column 3, the decimals are
not set to 2 because the length of the string exceeds the total length. If we adjust the query
as follows:
select ltrim( str( 4.35, 25, 2)),
ltrim( str( 12.423, 25, 2)),
ltrim( str( 234.34, 24, 2)),
ltrim( str( 6.3345, 25, 2))
------------- ------------- ------------ --------------
4.35 12.42 234.34 6.33
Now I have strings with the proper number of decimals. Of course, if I want to
get each string set to the same length and right justified, I still have some formatting
to do, but I will stop here for now.
Conclusion
I hope that I have shed some light on a little used funciton and an alternative for converting
numeric values into strings. No earth shattering technical knowledge in this article, but perhaps
I will spark an idea or two in some of you.
As always, I welcome feedback and please rate this article below (and any you read on Swynk).
It helps to motivate and assist us authors in writing better columns.
Steve Jones
November 2000
