Find out the Binary, ASCII and Character of a Given String in SQL Server

When you are storing data inside fields like ‘address’, there are bound to be unusual characters in it which make way due to poor validation rules. A good way to look for them is to convert your string to varbinary.

I came across this cool query from Peter which shows how to convert a string to varbinary and find out the Binary, ASCII and Char of each character in the string. Here’s the query:

DECLARE @MyAddress varchar(35)
SET @MyAddress = 'CANTB RY EA%T P.O.Box 55343'

DECLARE    @BIN AS VARBINARY(100)
SET    @BIN = convert(varbinary(100),@MyAddress)

SELECT    SUBSTRING(@BIN, Number, 1) AS Binary,
ASCII(SUBSTRING(@BIN, Number, 1)) AS ASCII,
CHAR(ASCII(SUBSTRING(@BIN, Number, 1))) AS Character
FROM    master..spt_values
WHERE    Type = 'p'
AND Number BETWEEN 1 AND DATALENGTH(@BIN)

OUTPUT

About The Author

Suprotim Agarwal, MCSD, MCAD, MCDBA, MCSE, is the founder of DotNetCurry, DNC Magazine for Developers, SQLServerCurry and DevCurry. He has also authored a couple of books 51 Recipes using jQuery with ASP.NET Controls and a new one recently at The Absolutely Awesome jQuery CookBook.

Suprotim has received the prestigous Microsoft MVP award for nine times in a row now. In a professional capacity, he is the CEO of A2Z Knowledge Visuals Pvt Ltd, a digital group that represents premium web sites and digital publications comprising of Professional web, windows, mobile and cloud developers, technical managers, and architects.

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