How do you view ALL text from an ntext or nvarchar

Question

How do you view ALL text from an NTEXT or NVARCHAR(max) in SQL Server Management Studio? By default, it only seems to return the first few hundred characters (255?) but sometimes I just want a quick way of viewing the whole field, without having to write a program to do it. Even SSMS 2012 still has this problem :(

Answer 1

Quick trick:

SELECT CAST('<A><![CDATA[' + CAST(LogInfo as nvarchar(max)) + ']]></A>' AS xml)
FROM Logs
WHERE IDLog = 904862629

Answer 2

I have written an add-in for SSMS and this problem is fixed there. You can use one of 2 ways:

you can use "Copy current cell 1:1" to copy original cell data to clipboard:

http://www.ssmsboost.com/Features/ssms-add-in-copy-results-grid-cell-contents-line-with-breaks

Or, alternatively, you can open cell contents in external text editor (notepad++ or notepad) using "Cell visualizers" feature: http://www.ssmsboost.com/Features/ssms-add-in-results-grid-visualizers

(feature allows to open contents of field in any external application, so if you know that it is text - you use text editor to open it. If contents is binary data with picture - you select view as picture. Sample below shows opening a picture):

Answer 3

Options (Query Results/SQL Server/Results to Grid Page)

To change the options for the current queries, click Query Options on the Query menu, or right-click in the SQL Server Query window and select Query Options.

...

Maximum Characters Retrieved
Enter a number from 1 through 65535 to specify the maximum number of characters that will be displayed in each cell.

Maximum is, as you see, 64k. Default is much smaller.

BTW Results to Text has even more drastic limitation:

Maximum number of characters displayed in each column
This value defaults to 256. Increase this value to display larger result sets without truncation. The maximum value is 8,192.

Answer 4

The easiest way to quickly view large varchar/text column:

declare @t varchar(max)

select @t = long_column from table

print @t

Answer 5

I was able to get the full text (99,208 chars) out of a NVARCHAR(MAX) column by selecting (Results To Grid) just that column and then right-clicking on it and then saving the result as a CSV file. Funny enough, when I tried to run the same query, but having Results to File enabled, the output was truncated using the Results to Text limit.

The work-around that @MartinSmith described as a comment to the (currently) accepted answer didn't work for me (got an error when trying to view the full XML result complaining about "The '[' character, hexadecimal value 0x5B, cannot be included in a name").