SQL select to get a string between two spaces

Question

I have a field with names in the format DOE JOHN HOWARD or DOE JOHN H.

I need a query to get the string between the two spaces (JOHN in this case).

The SO an

Answer 1

There is a somewhat sneaky way you could do this using PARSENAME.

It's intended purpose is to get particular parts of an object/namespace, however, in this case you could use it by replacing the strings with periods first.

E.g.,

SELECT PARSENAME(REPLACE('DOE JOHN HOWARD',' ','.'),2)

Answer 2

One way:

select 
left(substring(fld, 
    charindex(' ', fld) + 1, len(fld)), 
    charindex(' ', substring(fld, charindex(' ', fld) + 2, len(fld)))) 

Answer 3

After doing some searches to resolve my problem, realised there is no generic answer, so below is piece of code to find string between some other strings. I think it may be useful for somebody in future.

DECLARE @STRING NVARCHAR(MAX) = 'Something here then stringBefore Searching stringAfter something there.'
DECLARE @FIRST NVARCHAR(20) = 'stringBefore'
DECLARE @SECOND NVARCHAR(20) = 'stringAfter'
DECLARE @SEARCHING NVARCHAR (20)

SET @SEARCHING = (SELECT SUBSTRING(@STRING, CHARINDEX(@FIRST, @STRING) + LEN(@FIRST), CHARINDEX(@SECOND, @STRING) - CHARINDEX(@FIRST, @STRING) - LEN(@FIRST))) 
-- if you want to remove empty spaces
SET @SEARCHING = REPLACE(@SEARCHING, ' ', '')
SELECT @SEARCHING

Then output as below:

(No column name)

Searching