RIGHT (Transact-SQL)

Article
05/23/2023

Applies to: SQL Server Azure SQL Database Azure SQL Managed Instance Azure Synapse Analytics Analytics Platform System (PDW) SQL analytics endpoint in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse in Microsoft Fabric

Returns the right part of a character string with the specified number of characters.

Transact-SQL syntax conventions

Syntax

RIGHT ( character_expression , integer_expression )

Note

To view Transact-SQL syntax for SQL Server 2014 (12.x) and earlier versions, see Previous versions documentation.

Arguments

character_expression
Is an expression of character or binary data. character_expression can be a constant, variable, or column. character_expression can be of any data type, except text or ntext, that can be implicitly converted to varchar or nvarchar. Otherwise, use the CAST function to explicitly convert character_expression.

Note

If string_expression is of type binary or varbinary, RIGHT will perform an implicit conversion to varchar, and therefore will not preserve the binary input.

integer_expression
Is a positive integer that specifies how many characters of character_expression will be returned. If integer_expression is negative, an error is returned. If integer_expression is type bigint and contains a large value, character_expression must be of a large data type such as varchar(max).

Return Types

Returns varchar when character_expression is a non-Unicode character data type.

Returns nvarchar when character_expression is a Unicode character data type.

Supplementary Characters (Surrogate Pairs)

When using SC collations, the RIGHT function counts a UTF-16 surrogate pair as a single character. For more information, see Collation and Unicode Support.

Examples

A: Using RIGHT with a column

The following example returns the five rightmost characters of the first name for each person in the AdventureWorks2022 database.

SELECT RIGHT(FirstName, 5) AS 'First Name'  
FROM Person.Person  
WHERE BusinessEntityID < 5  
ORDER BY FirstName;  
GO

Here is the result set.

First Name  
----------  
Ken  
Terri  
berto  
Rob  
  
(4 row(s) affected)

Examples: Azure Synapse Analytics and Analytics Platform System (PDW)

B. Using RIGHT with a column

The following example returns the five rightmost characters of each last name in the DimEmployee table.

-- Uses AdventureWorks  
  
SELECT RIGHT(LastName, 5) AS Name  
FROM dbo.DimEmployee  
ORDER BY EmployeeKey;

Here is a partial result set.

Name
-----
lbert
Brown
rello
lters

C. Using RIGHT with a character string

The following example uses RIGHT to return the two rightmost characters of the character string abcdefg.

SELECT RIGHT('abcdefg', 2);