Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Have you dealt with ENTER key in INSERT table?

I have a client who uses the application that allows to insert data but also typing ENTER key in the middle. Well, the question is how do you want to store the data and later displaying on the client? He was not sure , so I showed him the below technique to display such kind of data....


--Create auxiliary table
SELECT TOP 8000 n = IDENTITY(INT)
INTO Numbers
FROM syscolumns s1, syscolumns s2 ;

CREATE TABLE test (col1 varchar(8000))

INSERT INTO test values ( 'Row----------1
Row--------2
Row--3
Row----4'
)

---See how it stores the data.
SELECT * FROM TEST

--Remove ENTER key
SELECT SUBSTRING(col1, n, CHARINDEX(CHAR(13), col1 + CHAR(13), n) - n)
FROM Numbers, test
WHERE SUBSTRING(CHAR(13) + col1, n, 1) = CHAR(13)
AND n < LEN(col1) + 1 ;

--Cleanup
DROP TABLE Numbers
DROP TABLE test

No comments: