How do I sort within a varchar column?
Such as I have a column called [Country], it may contain all kinds of country names.
Country column may contain
"Russia, USA, France, UK, Japan, Russia, France, China".
How do I distinct within [Country] column and sort the string alphabetically?
In the end, I want to get:
"China, France, Japan, Russia, UK, USA"
in [Country] column.
Just as a side note: what TheGameiswar posted will work very well if provided that @string don't coptain any special XML characters. If it did you would need to make a small adjustment. This:
for xml path('')),1,1,'')
Would need to become this:
for xml path(''),TYPE).value('.', 'varchar(1000)'),1,1,'');
Consider the following query along with my comments:
declare @string varchar(max)
set @string='<tag3>,<tag1>,<tag2>';
-- Note the output here:
;with cte
as
(
select *
from dbo.delimitedSplit8K(@string,',')
)
select stuff( (select ',' +item
from cte
order by item
for xml path('')),1,1,'');
-- this will handle special XML characters:
WITH cte
as
(
select *
from dbo.delimitedSplit8K(@string,',')
)
select stuff( (select ',' +item
from cte
order by item
for xml path(''),TYPE).value('.', 'varchar(1000)'),1,1,'');
The change I'm showing will reduce the performance a little but handles special XML characters correctly.
Edit: I forgot to mention- the "splitter" I am using is from This article: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Tally+Table/72993/
You will need to use one of the split string functions from here and then combine them again..
declare @string varchar(max)
set @string='Russia, USA, France, UK, Japan, Russia, France, China'
;with cte
as
(
select *
from [dbo].[SplitStrings_Numbers](@string,',')
)
select stuff( (select ',' +item
from cte
order by item
for xml path('')),1,1,'')