SQL Query - Concatenating Results into One String

SQL Query - Concatenating Results into One String

If you're on SQL Server 2005 or up, you can use this FOR XML PATH & STUFF trick:

DECLARE @CodeNameString varchar(100)

SELECT 
   @CodeNameString = STUFF( (SELECT ',' + CodeName 
                             FROM dbo.AccountCodes 
                             ORDER BY Sort
                             FOR XML PATH('')), 
                            1, 1, '')

The FOR XML PATH('') basically concatenates your strings together into one, long XML result (something like ,code1,code2,code3 etc.) and the STUFF puts a "nothing" character at the first character, e.g. wipes out the "superfluous" first comma, to give you the result you're probably looking for.

UPDATE: OK - I understand the comments - if your text in the database table already contains characters like <, > or &, then my current solution will in fact encode those into <, >, and &.

If you have a problem with that XML encoding - then yes, you must look at the solution proposed by @KM which works for those characters, too. One word of warning from me: this approach is a lot more resource and processing intensive - just so you know.

How to concatenate text from multiple rows into a single text string in SQL Server

If you are on SQL Server 2017 or Azure, see Mathieu Renda answer.

I had a similar issue when I was trying to join two tables with one-to-many relationships. In SQL 2005 I found that XML PATH method can handle the concatenation of the rows very easily.

If there is a table called STUDENTS

SubjectID       StudentName
----------      -------------
1               Mary
1               John
1               Sam
2               Alaina
2               Edward

Result I expected was:

SubjectID       StudentName
----------      -------------
1               Mary, John, Sam
2               Alaina, Edward

I used the following T-SQL:

SELECT Main.SubjectID,
       LEFT(Main.Students,Len(Main.Students)-1) As "Students"
FROM
    (
        SELECT DISTINCT ST2.SubjectID, 
            (
                SELECT ST1.StudentName + ',' AS [text()]
                FROM dbo.Students ST1
                WHERE ST1.SubjectID = ST2.SubjectID
                ORDER BY ST1.SubjectID
                FOR XML PATH (''), TYPE
            ).value('text()[1]','nvarchar(max)') [Students]
        FROM dbo.Students ST2
    ) [Main]

You can do the same thing in a more compact way if you can concat the commas at the beginning and use substring to skip the first one so you don't need to do a sub-query:

SELECT DISTINCT ST2.SubjectID, 
    SUBSTRING(
        (
            SELECT ','+ST1.StudentName  AS [text()]
            FROM dbo.Students ST1
            WHERE ST1.SubjectID = ST2.SubjectID
            ORDER BY ST1.SubjectID
            FOR XML PATH (''), TYPE
        ).value('text()[1]','nvarchar(max)'), 2, 1000) [Students]
FROM dbo.Students ST2

How to concat many rows into one string in SQL Server 2008?

Try this one -

DECLARE @temp TABLE (name NVARCHAR(50))

INSERT INTO @temp (name)
VALUES ('kim'),('lee'),('park'),('cho')

SELECT STUFF((
    SELECT ',' + name
    FROM @temp
    FOR XML PATH(''), TYPE).value('.', 'NVARCHAR(MAX)'), 1, 1, '')

Output -

kim,lee,park,cho

Concatenating results of SELECT query only returns one value

The question is indeed a duplicate. A comprehensive answer can be found in the following stackoverflow question: nvarchar concatenation / index / nvarchar(max) inexplicable behavior.

Several valid solutions to the problem of concatenating strings in a SELECT query are provided in this article: https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/t-sql-programming/concatenating-row-values-in-transact-sql/

SQL, How to Concatenate results?

With MSSQL you can do something like this:

declare @result varchar(500)
set @result = ''
select @result = @result + ModuleValue + ', ' 
from TableX where ModuleId = @ModuleId

How to concatenate many rows with same id in sql?

In SQL-Server you can do it in the following:

QUERY

SELECT id, displayname = 
    STUFF((SELECT DISTINCT ', ' + displayname
           FROM #t b 
           WHERE b.id = a.id 
          FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 2, '')
FROM #t a
GROUP BY id

TEST DATA

create table #t 
(
id int,
displayname nvarchar(max)
)

insert into #t values    
 (1 ,'Editor')
,(1 ,'Reviewer')
,(7 ,'EIC')
,(7 ,'Editor')
,(7 ,'Reviewer')
,(7 ,'Editor')
,(19,'EIC')
,(19,'Editor')
,(19,'Reviewer')

OUTPUT

id  displayname
1   Editor, Reviewer
7   Editor, EIC, Reviewer
19  Editor, EIC, Reviewer

SQL Concatenate String in Result

You would use something like:

SELECT 'http://aurl.com/something?q=' + cast(anInteger as varchar) FROM table;

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