Select only n number of characters from VARCHAR(MAX) field

Question

I have a field with datatype VARCHAR and MAX length. However, I just want to print only the first 2000 characters from that field. I cannot use VARCHAR(2000) as the datatype for the field upon table creation since there are a records exceeding this length and as you might all know, this results in a 'String or binary data would be truncated' error.

What I'm doing is sending an email report which may get too lengthy because of that field so I just want to output the first 2000 characters.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

you can use substring.

select SUBSTRING(yourcolumnname,0,2000) from yourtablename