Deleting Leading Zeros in a String (SQL)

A common issue while importing data from different source into SQL Server is often numbers get prefixed with zeroes. If you want to delete these leading zeroes in a string, you can use the following methods:

Method 1 : CAST to Bigint

declare @s varchar(100)
set @s ='0000004007340007402100'
select cast(@s as bigint)

CASTing the string to Bigint will automatically delete the leading zeroes



Method 2 : Use Replace function

declare @s varchar(100)
set @s ='0000004007340007402100'
select replace(ltrim(replace(@s,'0',' ')),' ','0')

The T-SQL code shown above first replaces all zeroes to a single space. The LTRIM function deletes all leading spaces and the second replace function, replaces all spaces to zeroes, so that all leading zeroes are deleted.

OUTPUT

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About The Author

Madhivanan,an MSc computer Science graduate from Chennai-India, works as a Project Manager at Elite Software Solutions. He started his career as a developer working with Visual Basic 6.0, SQL Server 2000 and Crystal Report 8. As years went by, he started working more on writing queries in SQL Server. He now has good level of knowledge in SQLServer, Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL as well. He is also one of the leading posters at www.sqlteam.com and a moderator at www.sql-server-performance.com. His T-sql blog is at http://beyondrelational.com/blogs/madhivanan

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