Better techniques for trimming leading zeros in SQ

Question

I've been using this for some time:

SUBSTRING(str_col, PATINDEX('%[^0]%', str_col), LEN(str_col))

However recently, I've found a problem with columns with all "0" characters like '00000000' because it never finds a non-"0" character to match.

An alternative technique I've seen is to use TRIM:

REPLACE(LTRIM(REPLACE(str_col, '0', ' ')), ' ', '0')

This has a problem if there are embedded spaces, because they will be turned into "0"s when the spaces are turned back into "0"s.

I'm trying to avoid a scalar UDF. I've found a lot of performance problems with UDFs in SQL Server 2005.

Answer 1

replace(ltrim(replace(Fieldname.TableName, '0', '')), '', '0')

The suggestion from Thomas G worked for our needs.

The field in our case was already string and only the leading zeros needed to be trimmed. Mostly it's all numeric but sometimes there are letters so the previous INT conversion would crash.