How can I remove leading and trailing quotes in SQL Server?

Question

I have a table in a SQL Server database with an NTEXT column. This column may contain data that is enclosed with double quotes. When I query for this column, I want to remo

Answer 1

I thought this is a simpler script if you want to remove all quotes

UPDATE Table_Name
SET col_name = REPLACE(col_name, '"', '')

Answer 2

I know this is an older question post, but my daughter came to me with the question, and referenced this page as having possible answers. Given that she's hunting an answer for this, it's a safe assumption others might still be as well.

All are great approaches, and as with everything there's about as many way to skin a cat as there are cats to skin.

If you're looking for a left trim and a right trim of a character or string, and your trailing character/string is uniform in length, here's my suggestion:

SELECT SUBSTRING(ColName,VAR, LEN(ColName)-VAR)

Or in this question...

SELECT SUBSTRING('"this is a test message"',2, LEN('"this is a test message"')-2)

With this, you simply adjust the SUBSTRING starting point (2), and LEN position (-2) to whatever value you need to remove from your string.

It's non-iterative and doesn't require explicit case testing and above all it's inline all of which make for a cleaner execution plan.

Answer 3

My solution is to use the difference in the the column values length compared the same column length but with the double quotes replaced with spaces and trimmed in order to calculate the start and length values as parameters in a SUBSTRING function.

The advantage of doing it this way is that you can remove any leading or trailing character even if it occurs multiple times whilst leaving any characters that are contained within the text.

Here is my answer with some test data:

 SELECT 
  x AS before
  ,SUBSTRING(x 
       ,LEN(x) - (LEN(LTRIM(REPLACE(x, '"', ' ')) + '|') - 1) + 1 --start_pos
       ,LEN(LTRIM(REPLACE(x, '"', ' '))) --length
       ) AS after
FROM 
(
SELECT 'test'     AS x UNION ALL
SELECT '"'        AS x UNION ALL
SELECT '"test'    AS x UNION ALL
SELECT 'test"'    AS x UNION ALL
SELECT '"test"'   AS x UNION ALL
SELECT '""test'   AS x UNION ALL
SELECT 'test""'   AS x UNION ALL
SELECT '""test""' AS x UNION ALL
SELECT '"te"st"'  AS x UNION ALL
SELECT 'te"st'    AS x
) a

Which produces the following results:

before  after
-----------------
test    test
"   
"test   test
test"   test
"test"  test
""test  test
test""  test
""test""    test
"te"st" te"st
te"st   te"st

One thing to note that when getting the length I only need to use LTRIM and not LTRIM and RTRIM combined, this is because the LEN function does not count trailing spaces.

Answer 4

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.TRIM(@String VARCHAR(MAX), @Char varchar(5))
RETURNS VARCHAR(MAX)
BEGIN
RETURN SUBSTRING(@String,PATINDEX('%[^' + @Char + ' ]%',@String)
    ,(DATALENGTH(@String)+2 - (PATINDEX('%[^' + @Char + ' ]%'
    ,REVERSE(@String)) + PATINDEX('%[^' + @Char + ' ]%',@String)
    )))
END
GO

Select dbo.TRIM('"this is a test message"','"')

Reference : http://raresql.com/2013/05/20/sql-server-trim-how-to-remove-leading-and-trailing-charactersspaces-from-string/

Answer 5

The following script removes quotation marks only from around the column value if table is called [Messages] and the column is called [Description].

-- If the content is in the form of "anything" (LIKE '"%"')
-- Then take the whole text without the first and last characters 
-- (from the 2nd character and the LEN([Description]) - 2th character)

UPDATE [Messages]
SET [Description] = SUBSTRING([Description], 2, LEN([Description]) - 2)
WHERE [Description] LIKE '"%"'

Answer 6

You can simply use the "Replace" function in SQL Server.

like this ::

select REPLACE('this is a test message','"','')

note: second parameter here is "double quotes" inside two single quotes and third parameter is simply a combination of two single quotes. The idea here is to replace the double quotes with a blank.

Very simple and easy to execute !