I am working on a chapter for Syngress’ 70-433 test prep guide, and talking about character sets. In my research I wanted to write a query that would return the values 0 through 255 and the the character associated with each of those numbers.
Yeah if I had a table Like AdventureWorks.Person.Contact where there was a set of 256 contiguous values, I could highjack those values for my source numbers, but that seems much less elegant.
Here is what I came up with:
|
WITH numbers AS
|
Note the OPTION (MAXRECURSION 255) at the end. Without that it will error after the first 100 rows (really its after the 100th recursion along this branch, but I digress) by default. But that option will cause it to error if I don’t stop the recursion myself at 255, hence the WHERE Number + 1 <= 255 where clause on the recursive query definition in the CTE.
Anyhow, if you run the query above you will get a result similar to the following
|
Number Character |
Enjoy!