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SQL SERVER: Read values from Comma Separated variable
05 May 2009
Tejas Shah
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As we have seen, How to generate Comma separated List in SQL. Today we know, how to get values from Comma separated column. Many times developers asked, How can I read comma separated values from variable? There are many ways to get solution for this. Lets discuss about the best way, I think so. We can use XML to read values from comma separated values. XML made our life easy.

Example:
I have created one procedure which has one parameter VARCHAR(100). This procedure contains the parameter having value like '1,5,6,20'. The requirement is: Update the records having ID = 1,5,6,20 (Any of them). This is the one way that we can prepare the SQL query.
 Proposed Solution:
Convert VARCHAR variable to XML as follows:

SET @xmlIDs =    '
                    ' + REPLACE(@str, ',', '') + '' +
                ''

So this statement will generate XML from VARCHAR value as follows:

  1
  6
  7
  8
  20

So, Now this is the XML, which can be easily read in SQL SERVER (2005 and above) as:

SELECT x.v.value('.','INT')
FROM @xmlIDs.nodes('/IDs/ID') x(v)

This will give me result set as ( as a separate table)
 

So that’s it, Now I can easily use this result set in my query, to update the rows accordingly.
So my Procedure looks like:

CREATE PROC Test_ReadValuesFromCommaSeparatedVariable
    @str    VARCHAR(100)
AS
DECLARE @XmlIDs XML
SET @xmlIDs =    '
                    ' + REPLACE(@str, ',', '') + '' +
                ''
UPDATE    TableName
SET        Flag = 1
WHERE    ID IN(
                SELECT x.v.value('.','INT')
                FROM @xmlIDs.nodes('/IDs/ID') x(v)
            )


So, it is very easy to read values from Comma separated value.
 Let me know if it helps you.

Tags

SQL Comma Separated List SQL Tips DBA XML MS SQL Server

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Tejas Shah

Microsoft Certified Professional Expert. I have 14+ years of experience in Design and Develop 100+ .Net applications using Asp.Net, C#, Asp.Net Core, VB.Net, SQL Server, MVC, AngularJS, JavaScript, Azure, HTML5 and CSS3.

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