Need to divide a date part in SQL Server - sql

Question

I have a column in my table with these values:
PING_TO_ME_20100828_Any87
TO_THESE_D_COLUMN_ENTRY_20200825
TO_THESE_D_20100829_COLUMN_ENTRY
201901_ARE_YOU_TRYING_TO_REACH47
ASK_TO_UOU_201008
I need to separate date values in a separate column.
My output should be:
20100828
20200825
20100829
201901
201008
Any help is very much appreciated.

Answer 1

You will (and already have) likely get comments about this telling you to fix your design. And while that is likely true...I won't try to pick apart why you are doing this, and I'll just give you the answer you came here for.
Your goal is to pick out either an 8 digit string of integers, or a 6 digit string of integers.
Here is one way you could do it:
SELECT x.y
, COALESCE(SUBSTRING(x.y, NULLIF(PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]%', x.y), 0), 8)
, SUBSTRING(x.y, NULLIF(PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]%', x.y), 0), 6))
FROM (
VALUES ('PING_TO_ME_20100828_Any87'),
('TO_THESE_D_COLUMN_ENTRY_20200825'),
('TO_THESE_D_20100829_COLUMN_ENTRY'),
('201901_ARE_YOU_TRYING_TO_REACH47'),
('ASK_TO_UOU_201008')
) x(y)
Explanation:
Since you are looking for both 8 and 6 digit values, you need to check for the longer of the two first. So first I search for the occurrence of a string of 8 integers using:
NULLIF(PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]%', x.y), 0)
This returns the first position of a string of 8 integers. The reason I wrap it in a NULLIF() is because if the value is not found, then PATINDEX will return 0.
I use NULLIF() to return NULL in that case, essentially indicating nothing was found. If you pass a NULL value to SUBSTRING() then it also returns NULL.
This is all just a nice way of "failing over" to the 6 character string check.
So there I do the same thing again:
NULLIF(PATINDEX('%[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]%', x.y), 0)
Except this time, I only repeat [0-9] six times. And again, I use the NULLIF() trick, so that it returns NULL if no string is found.
Throw that all into SUBSTRING() and COALESCE() and you've got a function that returns the results you're looking for.
Potential downsides
There are a couple down sides to this method.
It is not checking for a valid date, it's simply looking for a string of either 8 integers, or 6 integers. It could be 12345678 and it would still detect and return that.
If there are strings of integers longer than 8 digits, it will grab only the first 8 characters.
If there are multiple occurrences of 6 or 8 character integer strings...it will only return the first one.
There are much more robust ways you could write this, but it all depends on your data and what you need to do.
Other methods
Another way it could be done depending on which version of SQL Server you are using, is using STRING_SPLIT().
SELECT x.y, s.[value]
FROM (
VALUES ('PING_TO_ME_20100828_Any87'),('TO_THESE_D_COLUMN_ENTRY_20200825'),('TO_THESE_D_20100829_COLUMN_ENTRY'),('201901_ARE_YOU_TRYING_TO_REACH47'),('ASK_TO_UOU_201008')
) x(y)
CROSS APPLY (
SELECT [value]
FROM STRING_SPLIT(x.y, '_')
WHERE [value] LIKE '[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]'
OR [value] LIKE '[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]'
) s
This method handles a couple of the downsides mentioned earlier. For example, it will ONLY return integer strings of length 6 or 8. It will also return ALL integer strings of length 6 or 8 and not just the first one.
And there's other ways to identify the strings as well, like using ISNUMERIC(x.[value]) or TRY_CONVERT(int, s.[value]).
It all depends on how you are using this code...if it's runs fast enough, and it's a one off script, then it really doesn't matter. If it's running for millions of records at a time, then yeah you should play around with other methods.