Now I am a Bully, not a BullDozer?   sheeesh..., try and joke around. 

(Good picture though...). 

Check out this posting and see if it is similar to your needs. 

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=169&messageid=200907

Where I am now, they do not use vw and that is really tough when you are starting to recognize an actual table is not being used. 

The SPN part...

Thank you for your VERY considerate reply, Jereme Guenther! 

Should have figured Remi would beat me to the punch!  He writes excellent code, so now you have a choice.   

(This is...

Here is a nice procedure to strip out a delimited list.  I got it from someone else and put some refinements into it.  You will note in this instance, the delimiter...

I'm gonna call in the "Big Guns", Mr. Smarty-pants!  Sushila and NoelD!!!  They are WAY better at giving you a hard time than I am... 

Remi's solution is superior.  I may need to change my posting name to "Bulldozer".  I cannot seem to rid myself of that approach and depend upon using SQL Server's own...

  ooops...  Thanks

Remi,

When I tested your code it actually replicated the output 130 times.  Plus, with a 2000 character input, and using this function in a standard SP, we would have...

You can also use:

SELECT * FROM dbo.MyTable WHERE MyField LIKE '[']s%'

or you can always use the ASCII character:

SELECT * FROM dbo.MyTable WHERE MyField LIKE CHAR(39) + 's%'...

Thanks Remi!  Always glad to see my code improved upon....  I will look into your changes...

Still curious about the following: 

SELECT ASCII(...

That is really odd, because if you try the following: 

SELECT ASCII( '')

SELECT ASCII( ' ')

IF '' = ' '

     SELECT 'equal'

ELSE

     SELECT 'not equal'...

That is a really nice solution, (by both Jesper and Remi working together).  I have always had a problem with the RAND function as the seed will produce the same...

Here is one approach.  I imagine a number of people much smarter than I will either give you another direction or improve upon this. 

Basically, we created a table called...