Distinct characters in a field

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Distinct characters in a field

Author

Topic

mdhingra01
Posting Yak Master

179 Posts

Posted - 2005-01-12 : 14:13:36

Is there a way to query a field to determine the unique charcters in that
given field.

For example:
COLUMN1
apple
bat
car

The query should return
a
p
l
e
b
t
c
r

Thanks

mdhingra01
Posting Yak Master

179 Posts

Posted - 2005-01-12 : 14:40:34

I found this example works for what I am doing. Feel free to replace the sysobjects table with aonther if you need more than 135 in your numbers table.

use northwind
go

create table t (colA varchar(25))

insert into t values('apple')
insert into t values('bat')
insert into t values('car')

select top 25
identity(int, 1, 1) as number
into
number
from
sysobjects

select distinct
substring(t.colA, number, 1)
from
t cross join number as n
where
substring(t.colA, number, 1) > ''

drop table t, number
go

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