Using PATINDEX to find varying length patterns in T-SQL

Question

I\'m looking to pull floats out of some varchars, using PATINDEX() to spot them. I know in each varchar string, I\'m only interested in the first float that exists, but they

Answer 1

Yes you need to link to the clr to get regex support. But if PATINDEX does not do what you need then regex was designed exactly for that.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163473.aspx