MSSQL: LENGTH() inside of REPLICATE()

Question

Hello everyone

I have a MSSQL table with the columns "Lvl" and "Title". I need to insert a "-" in front of the title for every character in the Lvl field.

As an example: If Lvl = 111 the title shoud become "--- My Title".
I can only edit the following SQL-String. There is no possibility to create other functions or likewise.

SELECT     REPLICATE('_', { fn LENGTH(Lvl) }) + ' ' + Title AS Title
FROM         Documents

My Problem is, that the LENGTH() function doesn't work inside the REPLICATE() function. Does anybody know why or how to solve this problem?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Try this:

SELECT REPLACE(Lvl, '1', '-') + ' ' + Title as Title
FROM Documents

Simply take the Lvl column, and replace all instances of 1 with whatever character you want, then concatenate Title to the end of the result.

Answer 2

Try this. It works fine for me -

select REPLICATE('-',LEN(Lvl)) + ' ' + Title as title from documents