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 String conversion woes

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Phibian
Starting Member

32 Posts

Posted - 2005-05-26 : 17:22:14
I have a column in my database in which I'm storing comma separated values (as text).

A situation has come up where by it would be nice to compare a number to the comma separated values.

I was hoping to do something like SELECT * FROM Table WHERE ValueInt in Table.CSVText

This obviously doesn't work. Ideas?

graz
Chief SQLTeam Crack Dealer

4149 Posts

Posted - 2005-05-26 : 17:26:55
So has anyone suggested not storing CSV's in your database? You might consider normalizing that table.

That said ... We've got a number of articles on CSV. You can search the site for those.

If you just want to check for a single number that's pretty easy.

SELECT CHARINDEX(',19,', ',' + REPLACE(c1, ' ', '') +',')

should return all the rows with 19 in the CSV. (The syntax may be a little off).

Basically clean out the spaces and add a comma to both ends. Then each number has a delimiter and it pretty easy to search.



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Phibian
Starting Member

32 Posts

Posted - 2005-05-26 : 17:44:49
The idea behind storing the CSV was to avoid yet another association table.

No reason why we couldn't normalize it. Sigh ;)

Thanks for the other idea too though.

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