Converting commas or other delimiters to a Table or List in SQL Server

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In today's blog post, we will delve into an essential topic for anyone working with SQL Server: converting delimiters to a table or list. As you may already know, dealing with delimited data is a common challenge in data manipulation and analysis. Whether you're a seasoned SQL developer or just starting your journey in the database world, understanding how to efficiently convert delimiters to a structured format can greatly enhance your data processing capabilities.

When it comes to managing delimited data, SQL provides us with a powerful set of tools and functions. These tools allow us to seamlessly split, transform, and organize data that is separated by specific delimiters, such as commas, tabs, or any other character of our choice. By converting this unstructured data into a structured format like a table or a list, we can unlock a myriad of possibilities for data analysis, reporting, and integration with other systems.

Throughout this blog post, we will explore different techniques and strategies to tackle the challenge of delimiter conversion. We'll walk through step-by-step examples and discuss various SQL  functions and approaches that you can leverage to accomplish this task efficiently. Whether you need to split a comma-separated list into individual elements, extract values from a pipe-delimited string, or handle more complex scenarios, we've got you covered.

Create a function SplitString which is using a loop inside the table-valued function.

CREATE FUNCTION SplitString
(
    @in_string VARCHAR(MAX),
    @delimeter VARCHAR(1)
)
RETURNS @list TABLE(item VARCHAR(100))
AS
BEGIN
        WHILE LEN(@in_string) > 0
        BEGIN
            INSERT INTO @list(item)
            SELECT left(@in_string, charindex(@delimeter, @in_string+',') -1) as Item
    
            SET @in_string = stuff(@in_string, 1, charindex(@delimeter, @in_string + @delimeter), '')
        end
    RETURN 
END

this function allows two arguments or input parameters (1 – input string and 2 – delimiter):

SELECT * FROM SplitString('india,america,asia,europe', ',')

This is how we can Converting commas or other delimiters to a Table or List in SQL Server