Extracting First Name and Last Name

Question

I have a column named Name in a table called test which has Full name and I am trying to extract First name and Last Name. So I wrote query something like this:

Answer 1

The problem with your original code is here:

CHARINDEX(' ',[Name])-1

If [Name] does not contain a space, CharIndex returns 0. You subtract 1 and feed this in to the Left function. When the 2nd parameter to the left function is -1, you will get this error. In my opinion, the easiest way to "fix" this problem is to give the CharIndex function something to find, like this:

CHARINDEX(' ',[Name] + ' ')-1

Now... this code cannot fail.

You only NEED to do this one place in your original code, but you should add it to the LAST_NAME part also. If you don't, you will get incorrect results (eventhough you will not get an error).

SELECT [Name],
       LEFT([Name],CHARINDEX(' ',[Name] + ' ')-1)  AS FIRST_NAME,
       SUBSTRING([Name],CHARINDEX(' ',[Name] + ' ')+1,LEN([Name])) AS LAST_NAME
FROM   Test

This query will return the same results as the query suggested by @Sage, but (in my opinion) it is easier to read, and easier to understand.