The SQLite trim() function trims whitespace or other characters from both sides of a string.
The function returns a copy of the string that you provide as an argument, with either whitespace, or other characters as specified, trimmed from both sides.
Continue readingIn SQLite, the rtrim() function enables you to trim whitespace or other characters from the right part of a string.
It returns a copy of the string that you provide as an argument, with the right part trimmed of either whitespace, or other characters as specified.
Continue readingThe SQLite ltrim() function trims whitespace or other characters from the left of a string.
More precisely, it returns a copy of the string that you provide as an argument, with the left part trimmed of either whitespace, or other characters that you specify.
Continue readingIn SQL Server environments, two of the many string functions at our disposal are LEFT() and SUBSTRING().
These functions do a similar thing, but there are differences. This article looks at some of the main differences between these functions.
It can be easy to forget that the T-SQL FORMAT() function provides locale-aware formatting. Locale-aware means that the locale can affect the results. In other words, the exact output you get will depend on the locale.
By default, the function uses the language of the current session to determine the locale. However, this can be overridden by passing a “culture” argument to the function. Doing this allows you to provide results for a particular locale without having to change the language of the current session.
This article contains examples of how locale can affect the results when using the FORMAT() function in SQL Server.
Here’s a quick way to add brackets around negative numbers in SQL Server when using the FORMAT() function.
The goal here is that brackets are only added to negative values. No brackets are added to positive values or zeros. Also, the brackets replace any minus sign that would otherwise be displayed (in other words, no minus sign is displayed when the brackets are used).
Although formatting is often best left to the presentation layer, there may be cases that dictate a T-SQL solution in SQL Server. In such cases, hopefully this article helps.
This article provides a reference for the standard numeric format specifiers that can be used when formatting numbers using the FORMAT() function in SQL Server. Examples included.
Some of the examples use precision specifiers (these consist of one or two digits appended to the format specifier). Precision specifiers can be a value from 0 to 99, which specifies the precision of the result. How it works depends on the format specifier being used. For some format specifiers, it will specify the total number of digits in the result, for others it will specify the number of decimal places. In other cases it will be ignored altogether.
This article provides a reference for the custom numeric format specifiers that can be used when formatting numbers using the FORMAT() function in SQL Server. Examples included.
Perhaps one of the lesser-known features of the FORMAT() function in SQL Server is one that enables you to apply conditional formatting to a number.
It’s more of a .NET feature than it is a SQL Server (or T-SQL) feature, but SQL Server/T-SQL supports it all the same, allowing you to take full advantage of the ability to apply conditional formatting to numbers.
It all comes down to the format string you pass to the FORMAT() function.
You can pass a format string that specifies how the number should be formatted, depending on whether it’s positive, negative, or zero.
In SQL Server, the FORMAT() function enables you to format date/time and number values as a formatted string by passing in a “format string” as the second argument (the first argument is the value that’s being formatted).
Here’s an example of this function in action:
FORMAT(@date, 'dd/MM/yyyy');
In this case the format string is dd/MM/yyyy.
This particular format string specifies that the @date value should be formatted with a two-digit day, two-digit month, and a four-digit year, in that order, and with forward slashes as the separators.
This would result in something like this:
21/05/2019