How to extract this specific substring in SQL Server?

Question

I have a string with a specific pattern:

23;chair,red [$3]

i.e., a number followed by a semicolon, then a name followed by a left square br

Answer 1

select substring(your_field, CHARINDEX(';',your_field)+1 ,CHARINDEX('[',your_field)-CHARINDEX(';',your_field)-1) from your_table

Can't get the others to work. I believe you just want what is in between ';' and '[' in all cases regardless of how long the string in between is. After specifying the field in the substring function, the second argument is the starting location of what you will extract. That is, where the ';' is + 1 (fourth position - the c), because you don't want to include ';'. The next argument takes the location of the '[' (position 14) and subtracts the location of the spot after the ';' (fourth position - this is why I now subtract 1 in the query). This basically says substring(field,location I want substring to begin, how long I want substring to be). I've used this same function in other cases. If some of the fields don't have ';' and '[', you'll want to filter those out in the "where" clause, but that's a little different than the question. If your ';' was say... ';;;', you would use 3 instead of 1 in the example. Hope this helps!