How To Locate and Take Substrings with CHARINDEX() and SUBSTRING() Functions in SQL Server Transact-SQL?

Transact-SQL is not a language designed for manipulating strings, but it does have two simple functions to locate and take substrings: CHARINDEX() and SUBSTRING().

The tutorial exercise below assumes two given strings: 'Pages: 18' and 'Words: 3240'. The objective is to calculate the number of words per page. Read the script below to see how this is done by using CHARINDEX() and SUBSTRING() functions:

DECLARE @sPages VARCHAR(40), @sWords VARCHAR(40);
SET @sPages = 'Pages: 18';
SET @sWords = 'Words: 3240';
SET @sPages = SUBSTRING(@sPages, CHARINDEX(':', @sPages)+1, 20); 
SET @sWords = SUBSTRING(@sWords, CHARINDEX(':', @sWords)+1, 20); 
PRINT 'Number of words per page: '
   + CONVERT(VARCHAR(20), CONVERT(INT, @sWords)/CONVERT(INT, @sPages));
GO
Number of words per page: 180

If you are a PHP developer, you can get this done in a much quick way.

⇒Character Strings and Binary Strings in SQL Server Transact-SQL

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