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 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 and earlier, 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);