Comments on: SQL SERVER – Search Text Field – CHARINDEX vs PATINDEX

By: Brian Tkatch

Brian Tkatch — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:53:53 +0000

@Ron

This is a similar question as to why use ‘=’ if we can always use ‘LIKE’. The major difference is if a wildcard needs to be escaped or not.

I would guess, but i have no idea, that pattern searching is slower because it does more.

By: Ron Moses

Ron Moses — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:15:47 +0000

One bit of info I’m having trouble finding in any similar articles is… if PATINDEX is simply a more powerful CHARINDEX, why bother ever using CHARINDEX? Is there a performance difference?

By: SQLAuthority News - Best Articles on SQLAuthority.com Journey to SQL Authority with Pinal Dave

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:07:24 +0000

[...] SQL SERVER – Search Text Field – CHARINDEX vs PATINDEX [...]

By: Dave Coates

Dave Coates — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:43:29 +0000

Thanks! Your tips helped me clean and move data from one database to another :)

Nothing fancy, but was fun at least :D

Dave Coates
Port Elizabeth .NET Community Lead
South Africa

By: HAM

HAM — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 05:32:10 +0000

i am using PatIndex and need more clear code… for example

i want no. of letters next to the symbol ‘-’ so i use

patindex(‘%-%’, company-name). its working successfully.

but if the word is of ‘company-name-id’ and i want to

consider the symbol which is appearing at the last of the

word, what i have to do? patindex(‘%-%’, company-name-
id)

if i use this i am getting same as the previous… any one plz

suggest me the correct solution for this?

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:13:49 +0000

Hi, I’ve just started using PatIndex – it’s proved useful in a lot of my work lately.

Right now I am trying to do a search for one string, OR another. In other words a kind of ’string count’ function. So if either substring exists in a value, it returns true, or a number.

The string is: where column like ‘%a%’ or column like ‘%b%’

The only problem is that ‘column’ is itself a very long-winded subquery, so I don’t want to have to write it out twice in the above string.

So can I use some kind of regex in patindex to find the above?

Hope this makes sense. thanks for your ideas..

By: Ron

Ron — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:12:17 +0000

You can use the REPLACE() function to remove or replace special characters.

If you have a string like ‘Peninsula Inv00estment Management Comç’ that is in a field called CompanyName just type the following:

Select REPLACE(CompanyName,’ç’, ”) from Company. You can nest several REPLACE() functions to take out numerous characters at once.

Ron

By: Pradeep Jagadeesan

Pradeep Jagadeesan — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 12:50:26 +0000

How to search for special characters and remove it from the string
actual string ‘Peninsula Inv00estment Management Comç’

after removed special char

‘Peninsula Inv00estment Management Com’

Pl give me a solution.

By: Keerthi

Keerthi — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:30:19 +0000

Hello Dave,

I have been using PATINDEX and CHARINDEX for my project. But I want to extend the functionality so that I can search a occurence of a ‘word’ in a ‘text’ field and a ‘varchar’ field. Is there any way this can be achieved with the same functions.

If anyone knows about how to handle the search, kindly mail me.

Regards
Keerthi

By: Alex Bransky

Alex Bransky — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 22:21:57 +0000

CHARINDEX will only work on a text column if it can implicitly be converted to varchar (or ntext to nvarchar), so if the data is greater than 8000 bytes (approximately) you’ll get an error.