Words

Extracting All The Words From a String In A SQL Server Database Query

It is easy enough to extract the first word from a string in a database query, but what if you need to separate all words in a given string into a list of separate words?

This is a job for Common Table Expressions (CTEs) as they enable us to repeatedly read a single record while changing it each time.

Here is a SQL Server example which takes a string variable and spearates it into inidividual words. We use a combination of CHARINDEX, LEFT and RIGHT functions to achieve it.