Question

varchar HEX String to binary conversion

Asked by: CodeYankee

Greetings All,

I have a problem.  I have several thousand hex strings stored in a table as varchars.  I want to insert these into a table column of
binary data type.  When I run CONVERT(binary(252), column_name) on the table with the HEX strings it hacks up the hex string
and does not convert it to the correct binary value.  Now if I cut and past the same HEX value into a convert function, ie
CONVERT(binary(252, 0x00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000)
 I get the expected results.

Any ideas?

Thanks In Advance!

Agerent

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Asked On
2005-03-16 at 10:03:19ID21353245
Tags

hex

,

binary

,

string

,

varchar

Topic

MS SQL Server

Participating Experts
2
Points
0
Comments
6

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Answers

 

by: HilairePosted on 2005-03-17 at 01:43:06ID: 13563290

Not simple ...
I'm afraid you'll have to use a loop to update each record separately

I can post working code if you post table structure, or at least
tablename, primary key,
name and datatype of the char/varchar column that contains the binary strings,
and name and datatype of the binary/varbinary column to be updated

Hilaire

 

by: CodeYankeePosted on 2005-03-17 at 05:20:07ID: 13564481

Hilaire,

I am a friggin idiot.  Here's more detail and my simple solution.  I am reading byte arrays from a binary file and loading them into SQL Server.  
I read them out as a hex string, ie 0x0000.....  Ok when I tried to bulk insert them into a SQL Server binary column SQL Server barked
at me and said I needed to use convert to get the data in there.  As it turns out all I had to do was leave the "0x" off the front of the hex string
and all was good.

-CodeYankee

 

by: HilairePosted on 2005-03-17 at 05:23:28ID: 13564510

Glad you could find a solution by yourself

I suggest you post a free question in the Support Topic Area to get this question deleted and your points refunded

Hilaire

 

by: CodeYankeePosted on 2005-03-17 at 05:25:41ID: 13564532

Roger that.  Thanks for the post!

 

by: moduloPosted on 2005-03-21 at 13:34:23ID: 13595732

Closed, 125 points refunded.

modulo
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