test if first character of a value is upper case

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test if first character of a value is upper case

isaac_654135

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September 19, 2017 at 1:25 pm

#402501

I want to test whether or not the first character of every value is upper case, and the rest are lower case. I.E., if they are currently stored as proper case.
Is there a simple way to do this? Or do I have to test whether the value collate C.I. is in(a bunch of possible values) ?

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Lowell SSC Guru Points: 323518 More actions · Answer 1

you should only have to cast the comparison with a collate statement;
this worked for me, does this help?

i used 128 for the length, since a object name is no longer than that.
when you say Propercase, do you mean the second word in a string should be upper cased also?
so the table name [Invoice Details]? i have an inline propercase function for something like that somewhere.
select CASE WHEN UPPER(LEFT(name,1)) + LOWER(SUBSTRING(name,2,128)) = name collate Latin1_General_BIN THEN 'Expected Format' ELSE 'Bad Format' END, * FROM sys.tables

Lowell

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isaac_654135 Default port Points: 1414 More actions · Answer 2

This is a value in a varchar column, though, not sys tables with object names ... But I see what you mean. (or I guess you were just putting that as an example - ok, makes sense, thanks).
I need to brush up on collate statements as tools for comparing things with case sensitivity or not.

In my case, there is only going to be one word or phrase, I just want to verify that the first character of the first word (if there are multiple words) is capital, and the rest are not capital.
So are all collate statements case sensitive unless otherwise specific? meaning I could use any one of a bunch of different collate statements, as long as none of them specific CI ... do I understand that correctly?

Lynn Pettis SSC Guru Points: 442467 More actions · Answer 3

pisorsisaac - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 2:09 PM
This is a value in a varchar column, though, not sys tables with object names ... But I see what you mean. (or I guess you were just putting that as an example - ok, makes sense, thanks).
I need to brush up on collate statements as tools for comparing things with case sensitivity or not.
In my case, there is only going to be one word or phrase, I just want to verify that the first character of the first word (if there are multiple words) is capital, and the rest are not capital.
So are all collate statements case sensitive unless otherwise specific? meaning I could use any one of a bunch of different collate statements, as long as none of them specific CI ... do I understand that correctly?

He was showing you an example. Use your own table and data.

sgmunson SSC Guru Points: 110640 More actions · Answer 4

pisorsisaac - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 2:09 PM
This is a value in a varchar column, though, not sys tables with object names ... But I see what you mean. (or I guess you were just putting that as an example - ok, makes sense, thanks).
I need to brush up on collate statements as tools for comparing things with case sensitivity or not.
In my case, there is only going to be one word or phrase, I just want to verify that the first character of the first word (if there are multiple words) is capital, and the rest are not capital.
So are all collate statements case sensitive unless otherwise specific? meaning I could use any one of a bunch of different collate statements, as long as none of them specific CI ... do I understand that correctly?

COLLATE applies to what it follows. If you want to see the effects, try a SELECT of something both with and without a given collation. Another thing you can do is to look at the ASC() function for any given character to see what the actual ASCII character code is. Better yet, try comparing a value to itself with two different collations, where one is case sensitive, and the other is not. A mixed-case value is the ideal comparison, but it gets more valuable when you also do the same thing for a comparison of 'aaaaa' with 'AAAAA' under the same collation pair conditions. You'll get it figured out fairly quickly.

The reason Lowell suggested using Latin1_General_BIN is because that collation causes a binary character by character comparison, and I think you can understand why.

Steve (aka sgmunson) 🙂 🙂 🙂
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