Sometimes its the little things that get annoying like requesting some information from a DBA or a system admin at a remote site where you can’t run scripts but need someone to do it for you. Quick example you want to know what servers they have across their estate and ask them to run basically SELECT @@Servername and send the result back in excel.
SELECT @@VERSION AS [SQL Server and OS Version Info]
So you run across some servers and get the nicely formatted results
Copy and Paste to excel
and the Format is all over the shop, so a handy bit of code to have is the following. You can use it for stripping out carriage returns / line feed and tab. Just replace the @@version with whatever you want to remove the control characters from
</pre> SELECT REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(CAST(@@VERSION AS VARCHAR(MAX)), CHAR(13),''),CHAR(10),''),CHAR(9),'') AS [SQL Server and OS Version Info] <pre>
| Control character | Value |
|---|---|
| Tab | char(9) |
| Line feed | char(10) |
| Carriage return | char(13) |
and the result, nicely formatted. Simples
SQL Server Solutions 