Woah, lots of great stuff coming in here. I can hardly keep up. I keep refreshing to make sure what i am about to say has not been said and...

Pieter-423357 (11/17/2009)

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Pretty good trick, but do you really want to subject each row to the triple REPLACE function?

REPLACE is a costly function and will run for a good while...

My mind converted the OR to an AND since if you could use VARCHAR(MAX) then the first constraint about string length would not apply anyway.

Paul White (11/17/2009)

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Fixed that for ya! 😀

SDM (11/17/2009)

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The OP...

Oh, I do the strangest things for fun. The DHTML stuff was mainly code theft so the fun bit was actually seeing the end result in action and now we...

Yes. Though I did not specifically mention so I was aiming to intimate that I was avoiding the dynamic where possible.

Now for the fun stuff, the DHTML tooltip of the...

Yeah, makes sense.

I have the union one in there anyway because I need to reference by same table name later on.

It's basically for a wee html dashboard of jobs on...

First off. Nice article with a lot of things to think about.

As mentioned in the previous couple of posts. A ConvertProcToFunction would, in a lot of cases be even handier....

As a bit of a side bar, the REPLACE method is fine but only if you catch all the possible characters. For example, you missed "&" and a couple of...

OK, so the code is about the same but I also inserted the data to a table which was cleared between statistics time toggling:

--===== Do the testing in a nice...

Oops,...

Sigh, when will people learn to read before posting.

You are NOT using coalesce to concatenate.

in the example above, coalesce is used to remove NULL entries.

The below works just the same...

Jeff. Once again, greet work on the performance testing.

I did a wee compare last night but do not have the results due to a bit of a power cut.

Once character...

Actually you dont have replace the invalid characters if you use the FOR XML Clause, with the TYPE directive. You can then use an xquery to extract the value as...

Joel Mansford (10/14/2009)

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In my opinion the 'neatest' solution is to use a custom CLR aggregate function. Afterall this is an aggregate function. Happily MS provide a concatenate as...