SQL Cheat Sheet: String Functions (SQL Server / T-SQL)

Messy text is everywhere: names in the wrong case, phone numbers full of brackets, codes with missing zeros.

This 2-page cheat sheet gives you ready-to-use T-SQL to search, slice, mask and tidy text in SQL Server.

What’s inside

Trim any characters, not just spaces

Search from a position, or by pattern

Capitalise names properly

Clean up phone numbers by stripping brackets, dashes, dots and spaces in one go

Ignore accents when comparing text

Pull the first number out of a piece of text

Strip leading zeros, on any version of SQL Server

Split a full name into first and last names

Pad with leading zeros

Get the text after the last delimiter

Count how often a character appears

Pick the Nth item from a list with STRING_SPLIT

Mask an email address, keeping the first letter and the domain

Fill in a message template

Quote and escape text to make it safe for SQL or JSON

Find unwanted characters, plus handy extras like character codes and sound-alike matching

Who it’s for?

Analysts and developers cleaning or formatting text in SQL Server

Anyone preparing customer data for reports or exports

Office workers moving from Excel to SQL

Format

A 2-page A4 PDF, ready to print or keep open on a second screen.

Every query uses the same example tables, so you can follow along easily.

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For personal use only.

From Rosleecia Productions.