SQL Replace Commas in the a row of a table - sql

Question

I have table test( ID Numeric(11,0), report varchar(255) )
and data looks below
1 ,Age,,,,,,family_status,,,,,,
2 ,,,,,,,,retaliation,hostile environment,,,,
3 ,,,,,,,,,,,,,
4 ,,,,,,,,retaliation,,,,,
5 ,,,,,,,,,hostile environment,,,,
6 ,Age,,,,,,,,,,,,
7 ,,,,national_origin,,,,,,,,,
8 Sex,,,,,,,,,,,,,
9 ,,,,national_origin,,disability,,retaliation,,,,,
10 Sex,,,,,,,,retaliation,,,,,
11 ,,,,,,,,
and i would like to update this table by replacing or using any other data scribing to remove extra commas so that data looks
1 Age,family_status
2 retaliation,hostile environment
3
4 retaliation
5 hostile environment
6 Age
7 national_origin,
8 Sex
9 national_origin,disability,retaliation
10 Sex,retaliation
11
i try to use the below statement but not sure how to loop through so that it will check and remove all the commas
UPDATE table test SET report = replace(report , ',,', ',')

Answer 1

If you are just doing this as a one off task (rather than a scripted process you expect to use repeatedly) you could always just run this query repeatedly until you get 0 rows updated
UPDATE table test SET report = replace(report , ',,', ',')
WHERE report like '%,,%'
If you need to do this over and over, or put it in a program I recommend using your procedural (non SQL code) to do the replace where you have better text manipulation commands.
If you aren't thrilled with that, check out this blog article I wrote on a similar problem of replacing repeating spaces from a string.