SQL SERVER – Reverse String Word By Word

Earlier I wrote a blog post where I have reversed the entire string which was passed to the function. You can read that over here User Defined Functions (UDF) to Reverse String. In that blog post I wrote a function which would reverse an entire string. However, recently I read a question in SQLBangalore where the user wanted to reverse string, but wanted to keep all the words in the same order. For example,

If the string is – “I am Pinal Dave”, it should be reversed as “Dave Pinal am I.”

Well, here is the function which does the same task.

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[fn_ReverseWordsInSentence]
(
@ip VARCHAR(MAX)
)
RETURNS VARCHAR(MAX)
BEGIN
DECLARE @op VARCHAR(MAX)
SET @op = ''
DECLARE @Lenght INT
WHILE LEN(@ip) > 0
BEGIN
IF CHARINDEX(' ', @ip) > 0
BEGIN
SET @op = SUBSTRING(@ip,0,CHARINDEX(' ', @ip)) + ' ' + @op
SET @ip = LTRIM(RTRIM(SUBSTRING(@ip,CHARINDEX(' ', @ip) + 1,LEN(@ip))))
END
ELSE
BEGIN
SET @op = @ip + ' ' + @op
SET @ip = ''
END
END
RETURN @op
END
-- Usage
SELECT [dbo].[fn_ReverseWordsInSentence] ('My Name is Pinal Dave')
/*
Dave Pinal is Name My
*/

Let me know if you have a better way to solve this problem.

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)