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how do I remove the last 4 characters

  • July 20, 2009 at 5:16 am

    #140007

    Hi I need to replace a memo field called "desc" with itself minus the last four characters.

    Somebody has run a process which puts a rude word on the end of the decsriptions

    thanks ps its sql server 2000

  • July 20, 2009 at 6:13 am

    #1026874

    two ways...you can use the REPLACE function to replace the bad word with an empty string:

    UPDATE MYTABLE SET MYCOLUMN = REPLACE(MYCOLUMN,'BADWORD','')

    this is a better solution, because if the bad word does not exist, nothing gets replaced.

    If you just whack every column to remove the last 4 characters, you might chop something you didn't really want to do; you'd want to at least use a WHERE statement to test for the bad word:

    UPDATE MYTABLE SET MYCOLUMN = LEFT(MYCOLUMN,LEN(MYCOLUMN - 4) WHERE MYCOLUMN LIKE '%BADWORD'

    Lowell

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