I need the text (representation) of a id field in SQL Server 2005. Is there a way, we can generate the textual representation of the id field?
For instance, if the id field reads as 0x00000000000002F0, I need the text value of 0x00000000000002F0 so that I can run SUBSTR operations on the same.
Constraints
- I am not allowed to create a stored procedure in the Database (as creation of SP is not allowed)
Thanks!
You can convert unicode strings to binary using
SELECT CONVERT(VARBINARY(40),N'Hello World')
(returns 0x480065006C006C006F00200057006F0072006C006400)
Convert from binary back to unicode using
SELECT CONVERT(NVARCHAR(20), 0x480065006C006C006F00200057006F0072006C006400)
(returns 'Hello World')
Whilst it's not immediately obvious to me why you would want to do this for comparison purposes (as opposed to matching binary values), the undocumented function sys.fn_varbintohexstr
should do the trick
declare @vb binary(8)
,@vc varchar(20)
set @vb = 0x00000000000002F0
set @vc = sys.fn_varbintohexstr(@vb)
--prove that this works by concatenating a string to the varchar value
select @vb, '#' + @vc