Hey Terry unless I understood wrong I am not sure that Dougs solution actually does what you want. Sorry Doug, not sure you tested your code or perhaps you mistyped...

Assumed that field name is ID and that it is the first 6 characters is the portion you are looking at

I loaded it all into a temp table and used:

Select...

Thanks heaps, that works well.

Haven't done much previously with XML data in T-SQL, but once you get the hang of it, it fast and easy enough, just mind numbing when...

Hey thanks, very helpful.

in the end I had some fun trying to map what you had to what I was doing and then realised that simply creating a view of...