How can I select the first 100 characters in SQL Server?

Question

I want to truncate a column to a max of 100 characters. How do you do this in SQL Server?

Answer 1

Try this:

 SELECT LEFT (your_column, 100) FROM your_table 

Edit:

you can also try something like this:

  SELECT LEFT (your_column, LEN(your_column)-5) FROM your_table 

for say if you want to trim the last 5 characters from a record.