How can I tell if a VARCHAR variable contains a substring

Question

I thought it was CONTAINS  but that s not working for me    I m looking to do this   IF CONTAINS  stringVar   thisstring            I have to run one select or another  depending on whether that variable contains a string and I can t figure out how to get it to work  All the examples I m seeing are using columns in the contains    Thanks in advance

User · Accepted Answer

The standard SQL way is to use like   where  stringVar like   thisstring     That is in a query statement   You can also do this in TSQL   if  stringVar like   thisstring

User · Answer

Instead of LIKE  which does work as other commenters have suggested   you can alternatively use CHARINDEX   declare  full varchar 100     abcdefg  declare  find varchar 100     cde  if  charindex  find   full   gt  0      print  exists

User · Answer

CONTAINS is for a Full Text Indexed field - if not  then use LIKE

User · Answer

IF CHARINDEX  TextToSearch   TextWhereISearch  0   gt  0   gt  TEXT EXISTS      IF PATINDEX  TextToSearch    TextWhereISearch   gt  0   gt  TEXT EXISTS      Additionally we can also use LIKE but I usually don t use LIKE

[sql] How can I tell if a VARCHAR variable contains a substring?

Examples related to sql

Examples related to string

Examples related to contains

Examples related to sql-server-2012