Here is an easy way to get (extract) all of the characters before a special character in a string. In our example we have a listing of email addresses and we want to get the name before the @domain.
Tag: substring
Capitalize a string
When you look at your data, do you see a mish mash of formats? Do some people use camel case, some all lowercase, some upper? Here is a quick script that you can use to capitalize the first letter in your single word strings.
Jim Salasek's SQL Server Blog 