T-SQL: Opposite to string concatenation - how to split string into multiple records [duplicate]

Answer 1

Slight modification of the solution above so it works with variable-length delimiters.

create FUNCTION dbo.fn_Split2 (@sep nvarchar(10), @s nvarchar(4000))
RETURNS table
AS
RETURN (
    WITH Pieces(pn, start, stop) AS (
      SELECT 1, 1, CHARINDEX(@sep, @s)
      UNION ALL
      SELECT pn + 1, stop + (datalength(@sep)/2), CHARINDEX(@sep, @s, stop + (datalength(@sep)/2))
      FROM Pieces
      WHERE stop > 0
    )
    SELECT pn,
      SUBSTRING(@s, start, CASE WHEN stop > 0 THEN stop-start ELSE 4000 END) AS s
    FROM Pieces
  )

NB: I've used datalength() since len() reports incorrectly if there are trailing spaces.