PARSE (Transact-SQL)

Returns the result of an expression, translated to the requested data type in SQL Server 2012.

Transact-SQL Syntax Conventions

Syntax

PARSE ( string_value AS data_type [ USING culture ] )

Arguments

• string_value
  nvarchar(4000) value representing the formatted value to parse into the specified data type.

  string_value must be a valid representation of the requested data type, or PARSE raises an error.

• data_type
  Literal value representing the data type requested for the result.

• culture
  Optional string that identifies the culture in which string_value is formatted.

  If the culture argument is not provided, then the language of the current session is used. This language is set either implicitly, or explicitly by using the SET LANGUAGE statement. culture accepts any culture supported by the .NET Framework; it is not limited to the languages explicitly supported by SQL Server. If the culture argument is not valid, PARSE raises an error.

Return Types

Returns the result of the expression, translated to the requested data type.

Remarks

Null values passed as arguments to PARSE are treated in two ways:

1. If a null constant is passed, an error is raised. A null value cannot be parsed into a different data type in a culturally aware manner.

2. If a parameter with a null value is passed at run time, then a null is returned, to avoid canceling the whole batch.

Use PARSE only for converting from string to date/time and number types. For general type conversions, continue to use CAST or CONVERT. Keep in mind that there is a certain performance overhead in parsing the string value.

PARSE relies on the presence of .the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR).

This function will not be remoted since it depends on the presence of the CLR. Remoting a function that requires the CLR would cause an error on the remote server.

More information about the data_type parameter

The values for the data_type parameter are restricted to the types shown in the following table, together with styles. The style information is provided to help determine what types of patterns are allowed. For more information on styles, see the .NET Framework documentation for the System.Globalization.NumberStyles and DateTimeStyles enumerations.

More information about the culture parameter

The following table shows the mappings from SQL Server languages to .NET Framework cultures.

Examples

A. PARSE into datetime2

SELECT PARSE('Monday, 13 December 2010' AS datetime2 USING 'en-US') AS Result;

Here is the result set.

Result
---------------
2010-12-13 00:00:00.0000000

(1 row(s) affected)

B. PARSE with currency symbol

SELECT PARSE('€345,98' AS money USING 'de-DE') AS Result;

Here is the result set.

Result
---------------
345.98

(1 row(s) affected)

C. PARSE with implicit setting of language

-- The English language is mapped to en-US specific culture
SET LANGUAGE 'English';
SELECT PARSE('12/16/2010' AS datetime2) AS Result;

Here is the result set.

Result
---------------
2010-12-16 00:00:00.0000000

(1 row(s) affected)