Transact-SQL is not a language designed for manipulating strings, but it does have two simple functions to locate and take substrings: CHARINDEX() and SUBSTRING(). The tutorial exercise below assumes two given strings: 'Pages: 18' and 'Words: 3240'. The objective is to calculate the number of words per page. Read the script below to see how this is done by using CHARINDEX() and SUBSTRING() functions:

DECLARE @sPages VARCHAR(40), @sWords VARCHAR(40);

SET @sPages = 'Pages: 18';

SET @sWords = 'Words: 3240';

SET @sPages = SUBSTRING(@sPages, CHARINDEX(':', @sPages)+1, 20);

SET @sWords = SUBSTRING(@sWords, CHARINDEX(':', @sWords)+1, 20);

PRINT 'Number of words per page: '

+ CONVERT(VARCHAR(20), CONVERT(INT, @sWords)/CONVERT(INT, @sPages));

GO

Number of words per page: 180

If you are a PHP developer, you can get this done in a much quick way.