SELECT part of string between symbol and space - string

Question

I need to create a subquery (or view) column with values pulled from part of a long string. Values will appear like this:
"Recruiter: Recruiter Name Date:..."
I need to select the recruiter name after : and end with the space after the recruiter name. I understand that normalizing would be better, but we only have query access not database setup access in this case.
Ideas appreciated!

Answer 1

You can use a regex for this. A regex will let you express that you want to search for the text Recruiter followed by a colon, a space, and a series of characters followed by a space, and that you want it to extract those characters.
The expression might look a bit like this (untested)
Recruiter: (.+) Date:
This would look for 'Recruiter: ' literally, followed by a string of any characters (.) of length 1 or larger (+), which is to be extracted (the brackets), followed by the literal string ' Date:'.
How you use this with SQL depends on your vendor.

Answer 2

I would create a function that pulls out the value for a given key. You would use it like:
select [dbo].[GetValue]('recruiter',
'aKey: the a value Recruiter: James Bond cKey: the c value')
This returns 'James Bond'
Here is the function:
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO
create function [dbo].[GetValue](#Key varchar(50), #Line varchar(max))
returns varchar(max)
as
begin
declare #posStart int, #posEnd int
select #posStart=charindex(#Key, #Line) -- the start of the key
if(#posStart = 0)
return '' -- key not found
set #posStart = #posStart + len(#Key) + 1 -- the start of the value
select #line = substring(#line, #posStart, 1000) -- start #Line at the value
select #posEnd=charindex(':', #line) -- find the next key
if(#posEnd > 0)
begin
-- shorten #line to next ":"
select #line = substring(#line, 0, #posEnd)
-- take off everything after the value
select #posEnd = charindex(' ', reverse(#line));
if(#posEnd > 0)
select #line = substring(#line, 0, len(#line) - #posEnd + 1)
end
return rtrim(ltrim(#line))
end
go