SUBSTRING()

SUBSTRING() is a function in SQL that can be used to get substrings from strings based on start positions and length. You can use this function to get a substring from a string column or a literal value, providing you with the flexibility to work with textual data.

Syntax:

SUBSTRING(string, start, length)

• string: This parameter represents the string from which we need to extract the part of a string. This can be the column_name of an underlying table that contains the string values.
• start: This is the starting index from which the string should start extracting.
• length: This is an optional parameter that is used to represent the terminating index of the substring process. If this parameter is not mentioned, the length parameter will be assigned as the actual length of the string by default.

SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It is used to manage and query relational databases. In most cases, you will need to perform some operations on string data. For example, you may need to extract some characters from the string. Getting the first character of a string can be done in many different ways.

While Working on String in SQL, we need to manipulate and handle them under various conditions. we sometimes categorize the data based on the first character of the string. To get the first character from a string, we can use the SUBSTRING() function or SUBSTR() function. In this article, let us understand how to use these functions to get the first character of a string.