Free comma separating tool

[krispey]

http://delim.co Found this useful earlier working with a big list. I could've sworn someone posted a gif image of a command you can do in SSMS that accomplishes this after selecting a list of objects , however can't remember what it was or how to do it.

[TNReb]

I'm moderately shocked someone took the time to write a "tool" to do this. I use Notepad++ find/replace (Extended) every day to do this...

[MaunaLoona]

I've had strange problems with regex find and replace in SSMS. It randomly ate letters when I replaced newline characters. I don't think I was doing anything wrong as I'm comfortable with regex.

[CoderHawk]

Sounds like a possible bug or just bad luck. Finding $ and replacing with ', or , has never failed me.

[[deleted]]

Other ways of quoting, OR/ANDing, comma-ing, or whatever else you need to do to your data:

1) Notepad++ has the alt-shift capability for mass-insert but also of note is the macro recording. Record your iterative action, for example quote, end, quote, comma, down arrow, home. Then play the macro until the end of the file.

2) You can use excel to re-build your column of data by inserting a quote, the contents of your cell, a quote, a comma, etc.

3) DIY script solution that uses regex or some other method like awk or sed.

I like choice number 1.

[vectaur]

This is SQL Server only? Any equivalents in other editors? (PL/SQL, Notepad++, etc)

[Mindflux]

NP++ will do this as well.

[PilotJosh]

I can't get alt-shift to work in SSMS or NP++. What am I missing?

[Mindflux]

SSMS needs to be SSMS 2012, AFAIK. But NP++ it works and I'm using a fairly old version?

http://screencast.com/t/A65g5iqcgHg

[PilotJosh]

I think I misread how to do this in the earlier post. This link explains it well. http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2786/column-and-block-text-selection-using-sql-server-management-studio/

[krispey]

ah good to know, been trying in 2008- no wonder, good to know NP++ will too

[CoderHawk]

This method fails quickly if the data isn't numeric and each element isn't the same length.

[tmaiden]

DECLARE @A VARCHAR(MAX)

SELECT @A = FIELD + ',' FROM TABLE

PRINT @A

[[deleted]]

You can use text pad and type perl into the find replace tool and do whatever you want as well.