select data up to a space?

Question

I have an MSSQL database field that looks like the examples below:

u129  james
u300  chris
u300a jim
u202  jane
u5    brian
u5z   brian2

Is there a way to select the first set of characters? Basically select all the characters up until the first line space?

I tried messing around with LEFT, RIGHT, LEN, but couldn't figure out a way to do it with variable string lengths like in my example.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use a combiation of LEFT and CHARINDEX to find the index of the first space, and then grab everything to the left of that.

 SELECT LEFT(YourColumn, charindex(' ', YourColumn) - 1) 

And in case any of your columns don't have a space in them:

SELECT LEFT(YourColumn, CASE WHEN charindex(' ', YourColumn) = 0 THEN 
    LEN(YourColumn) ELSE charindex(' ', YourColumn) - 1 END)

Answer 2

select left(col, charindex(' ', col) - 1)

Answer 3

If the first column is always the same size (including the spaces), then you can just take those characters (via LEFT) and clean up the spaces (with RTRIM):

SELECT RTRIM(LEFT(YourColumn, YourColumnSize))

Alternatively, you can extract the second (or third, etc.) column (using SUBSTRING):

SELECT RTRIM(SUBSTRING(YourColumn, PreviousColumnSizes, YourColumnSize))

One benefit of this approach (especially if YourColumn is the result of a computation) is that YourColumn is only specified once.