Padding your numbers…just a little
I know padding your numbers in this economic crisis is a touchy issue. But let’s put our morals to the side for a moment and discuss how to do it. OK. Actually by ‘padding’ I’m really just meaning adding something extra flair to your number. Example
boring example: changing your number from 36 to 00036
exciting example: changing your number from 36 to WOW_LOOK_I_AM_36
Formatting in t-sql is limited. It doesn’t really care about how you want your data to look. What you wear to work isn’t the datacenter’s job. That’s your mother’s job.
The new function I discovered is STR. Not sure why I never used it before. The second argument for STR is how many characters you want your number to be…and it fills it with spaces. So STR(3,2) gives us the number 3 represented as a 2 character string like so: ‘ 3’. So throw in a replace (change spaces to 0s) and you have your pad. I placed mine in a computed column using an id column:
replace(str(id,3),’ ‘,0)
if you want to copy and paste the code below you can test it out
declare @myage int
set @myage = 36 –enter your age
select replace(str(@myage,3),’ ‘,’WOW_LOOK_I_AM_’)
