Tame Those Strings Part 4 - Numeric Conversions

January 14, 2001

This is a continuation of string manipulation techniques. If you are interested, you can read the other articles, though you do not need to read it before this one. These are mostly beginning programming articles, but advanced T-SQL programmers may still find something useful here.

• Part 1 deals with SUBSTRING and how it can be used to extract some information from a field of data
• Part 2 deals with CHARINDEX and how it can be used to extract some information from a field of data when the data is delimited rather than stored in a particular format.
• Part 3 deals with REPLACE and how it can be used to remove unwanted information from a field of data when the data is not in a known format.

Introduction

Continuing on with taming strings...

Often when I am reporting data from SQL Server, I am concatenating information together to form more readable output. Many times this output will also include some numeric data that needs to be placed inside a string. I am not sure exactly why an integer is not implicitly converted to a string, but it doesn't work, so I have to use another solution.

The Problem

Numeric values (whether integer or float) are not implicitly converted to characters within a string concatenation statement. Instead, the following statement (using Northwind):

select customerID + 5
   from customers

Server: Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Syntax error converting the nvarchar value 'ALFKI' to a column of data type int.

select 5 + customerID
   from customers

Server: Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Syntax error converting the nvarchar value 'ALFKI' to a column of data type int.

In the past I have used CONVERT, and more recently CAST, to convert the numeric data into character data. However there are a few issues with this technique. Consider the following code:

select quantity, 
		cast( quantity as char( 1)) 'Char_quantity'
 from [order details]

quantity Char_quantity 
-------- ------------- 
12       *
10       *
5        5
9        9

In the past, I have usually used code like the following:

select quantity, 
       rtrim( cast( quantity as varchar( 50))) 'Char_quantity'
 from [order details]

Suppose that I have a series of decimals like the following:

select 4.35,
       12.423,
       234.34,
       6.3345

----- ------- ------- ------- 
4.35  12.423  234.34  6.3345

select rtrim( cast( 4.35 as varchar( 50))),
       rtrim( cast( 12.423 as varchar( 50))),
       rtrim( cast( 234.34 as varchar( 50))),
       rtrim( cast( 6.3345 as varchar( 50)))

------------ -------------- ----------- ----------------
4.35         12.423         234.34      6.3345

But what if I need specific formatting? What if I need a specific length for formatting columns in a report? What if I am looking for xx number of decimals? It is easy to use SUBSTRING and SPACE to trim and then pad the columns, but this is cumbersome. For the decimals, then you run into another problem.

select rtrim( cast( round( 4.35, 2) as varchar( 50))),
       rtrim( cast( round( 12.423, 2) as varchar( 50))),
	    rtrim( cast( round( 234.34, 2) as varchar( 50))),
	    rtrim( cast( round( 6.3345, 2) as varchar( 50)))

------------ ------------ ---------- ---------- 
4.35         12.420       234.34     6.3300

In this code, the numbers are rounded to the proper number of decimals, but there are still the original number of characters in the converted strings. SUBSTRING presents a problem here unless I use CHARINDEX to find the decimal and then perform the proper operations. This gets cumbersome and I decided to search for an easier solution.

The Solution

I decided to search my handy-dandy Books Online (for those of you with young kids, you will get the joke. For the rest of you look here) in the string functions area and I found STR. This is a string function that is designed to convert numeric values to characters. Let us apply this to our sample data set.

select str( 4.35, 5, 2),
       str( 12.423, 5, 2),
       str( 234.34, 5, 2),
       str( 6.3345, 5, 2)

----- ----- ----- ----- 
 4.35 12.42 234.3  6.33

select ltrim( str( 4.35, 25, 2)),
       ltrim( str( 12.423, 25, 2)),
       ltrim( str( 234.34, 24, 2)),
       ltrim( str( 6.3345, 25, 2))

------------- ------------- ------------ -------------- 
4.35          12.42         234.34       6.33

Conclusion

I hope that I have shed some light on a little used funciton and an alternative for converting numeric values into strings. No earth shattering technical knowledge in this article, but perhaps I will spark an idea or two in some of you.

As always, I welcome feedback and please rate this article below (and any you read on Swynk). It helps to motivate and assist us authors in writing better columns.