In his article Can I convert this string to an integer?, Itzik Ben-Gan provides a solution in pure T-SQL and another that uses the CLR.
Which solution should you choose?
Is the T-SQL or CLR Solution Better? The advantage of using the T-SQL
solution is that you don’t need to go outside the domain of T-SQL
programming. However, the CLR solution has two important advantages:
It's simpler and faster. When I tested both solutions against a table
that had 1,000,000 rows, the CLR solution took two seconds, rather
than seven seconds (for the T-SQL solution), to run on my laptop. So
the next time you need to check whether a given string can be
converted to an integer, you can include the T-SQL or CLR solution
that I provided in this article.
If you only want to maintain T-SQL, then use the pure T-SQL solution. If performance is more important than convenience, then use the CLR solution.
The pure T-SQL Solution is tricky. It combines the built-in ISNUMERIC function with pattern-matching and casting to check if the string represents an int.
SELECT keycol, string, ISNUMERIC(string) AS is_numeric,
CASE
WHEN ISNUMERIC(string) = 0 THEN 0
WHEN string LIKE '%[^-+ 0-9]%' THEN 0
WHEN CAST(string AS NUMERIC(38, 0))
NOT BETWEEN -2147483648. AND 2147483647. THEN 0
ELSE 1
END AS is_int
FROM dbo.T1;
The T-SQL part of the CLR solution is simpler. You call the fn_IsInt function just like you would call ISNUMERIC.
SELECT keycol, string, ISNUMERIC(string) AS is_numeric,
dbo.fn_IsInt(string) AS is_int
FROM dbo.T1;
The C# part is simply a wrapper for the .NET's parsing function Int32.TryParse. This works because the SQL Server int and the .NET Int32 are both 32-bit signed integers.
using System;
using System.Data.SqlTypes;
public partial class UserDefinedFunctions
{
[Microsoft.SqlServer.Server.SqlFunction]
public static SqlBoolean fn_IsInt(SqlString s)
{
if (s.IsNull)
return SqlBoolean.False;
else
{
Int32 i = 0;
return Int32.TryParse(s.Value, out i);
}
}
};
Please read Itzik's article for a full explanation of these code samples.