SQL Reloaded: Pulling the Strings of SQL Server V (Character Indexes)

A string is in fact a concatenation or chain of characters, each character in the string having a position referred as character’s index. In programming it’s useful to identify the first occurrence of a character or string in forward or backwards order, with a few simple tricks being possible to identify all the occurrences of the characters or whole strings in a string. Such functions are appearing in some of the well known programming languages under names like InStr, IndexOf for forward processing, respectively, InStrRev, LastIndexOf. SQL Server has only one function for this purpose, namely CharIndex, used to retrieve the position where a character is found starting from a given position. If no occurrence was found, the function returns 0, while if no start position if given, the default is 0. There are several other remarks that could be found in MSDN, and it’s actually always a good idea to consult the documentation from time to time, not only when meeting a new function. But let’s get back to the CharIndex function with a few examples based on searching a character within a given string:

-- searching a character into a string 
DECLARE @string varchar(50)  
SET @string = 'this is a string'  
SELECT CharIndex(' ', @string) Example1  
, CharIndex(NULL, @string) Example2 
, CharIndex(NULL, @string, NULL) Example3 
, CharIndex(NULL, NULL, NULL) Example4 

Output:

Example1	Example2	Example3	Example4
5	NULL	NULL	NULL

If in the first example the function is used to retrieve the first occurrence of a space in the given string, in the last three examples is highlighted the behavior of the function in case one of the parameters is NULL, in such cases the function returning a NULL – this means that when other behavior is expected, it falls in your attributions to handle the NULL values accordingly.

Here’s a second set of examples based on the search of a string within another string. As can be seen there isn’t a difference at all in how the function is applied:

-- searching a string into a string
DECLARE @string varchar(50)  
DECLARE @search varchar(50)  
SET @string = 'this_is_another_string'  
SET @search = 'is'  
SELECT @string Example1 -- simple string  
, CharIndex(@search, @string) Example2 -- occurring position  
, CharIndex(@search, @string, 5) Example3 -- second occurring position 

Output:

Example1	Example2	Example3
this_is_another_string	3	6

From the three examples, the third deserves some special attention because it attempts to retrieve the second occurrence of the string by using a hardcoded starting value. In fact the search could start a position further from the first occurrence, something like in the below example:

-- searching a string into a string in foward/reverse order 
DECLARE @string varchar(50)  
DECLARE @search varchar(50)  
SET @string = 'this_was_a_string'  
SET @search = '_'  
SELECT @string Example1 -- simple string  
, CharIndex(@search, @string) Example2 -- 1st occuring position (forward)  
, CharIndex(@search, @string, CharIndex(@search, @string)+1) Example3 -- 2nd occuring position (forward)  
, CharIndex(@search, @string, CharIndex(@search, @string, CharIndex(@search, @string)+1)+1) Example4 -- 3rd 
occuring position (forward)

Output:

Example1	Example2	Example3	Example4
this_was_a_string	5	9	11

The logic could be repeated over and over again in order to retrieve the n-th position, list all the positions of occurrence or the total number of occurrences.

Even if SQL Server doesn’t provide a function for retrieving the first occurrence in backward order, in other words starting from the end to the start, there is actually a simple trick that might do it. As SQL Server provides a Reverse function, which reverses the value of the string provided as parameter.

-- 1st occurring position backwards 
DECLARE @string varchar(50)  
DECLARE @search varchar(50)  
SET @string = 'this_was_a_string'  
SET @search = '_'  
SELECT Len(@string) - CharIndex(@search, Reverse(@string))+1 Example 

Unfortunately the logic needed to retrieve the second and following occurrences starting from a given position it’s not so easy readable. Therefore, for the sake of “simplicity”, here’s the logic for reverse processing incorporated in CharIndexRev function:

-- reverse CharIndex 
CREATE FUNCTION dbo.CharIndexRev( 
@search varchar(50) 
, @string varchar(500) 
, @start int = 0) 
RETURNS int 
AS BEGIN 
RETURN Len(@string) - CharIndex(@search, Reverse(@string), CASE WHEN IsNull(@start, 0) != 0 THEN Len(@string) - @start+1 ELSE 0 END)+1 
END 

And here’s the function at work:

 

-- searching a string into a string in reverse order 
DECLARE @string varchar(50) 
DECLARE @search varchar(50) 
SET @string = 'this_was_a_string' 
SET @search = '_' 
SELECT dbo.CharIndexRev(NULL, @string, 0) Example1 
, dbo.CharIndexRev(@search, NULL, 0) Example2 
, dbo.CharIndexRev(NULL, NULL, 0) Example3 
, dbo.CharIndexRev(@search, @string, 0) Example4 
, dbo.CharIndexRev(@search, @string, dbo.CharIndexRev(@search, @string, 0)-1) Example5 
, dbo.CharIndexRev(@search, @string, dbo.CharIndexRev(@search, @string, dbo.CharIndexRev(@search, @string, 0)-1)-1) Example6 

Output:

Example1	Example2	Example3	Example4	Example5	Example6
NULL	NULL	NULL	11	9	5

As can be seen, the output of the last three examples matches the reversed output of the previous set (11, 9, 5) vs. (5, 9, 11), while the first three examples exemplify the behavior of the function when one of the parameters is Null.