SDU Tools: Extract Trimmed Words from T-SQL Strings

Occasionally I’ve needed to take a string, and extract all the words out of it. For example a string like ‘hello        there     greg’ might lead me to want the three words ‘hello’, ’there’, and ‘greg’. Note that I usually want them trimmed, not just extracted.

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a table-valued function ExtractTrimmedWords to help with this. You can pass it a string, and it will pull it apart for you, assuming that you have whitespace separating the words.

We use space, tab, carriage return, and line feed as whitespace characters for separating words.

The main image above shows it in use. As well as returning the words, we decided to return a WordNumber column as well, in case the ordering of the words matter to you.

I wish Microsoft had done that with their STRING_SPLIT function. (And we added that in our SplitDelimitedString function).

You can see ExtractTrimmedWords in action here:

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2018-08-15