Louis Davidson goes looking for list items:
From the title of “Favorite String Parsing”, I will say 100% it is using SQL Server 2025’s addition of Regular Expressions. Previously, parsing text in SQL Server was one of my least favorite things to do. Regular expressions will make it just a bit nicer, because it has a lot more power than
SUBSTRING,LEFT,RIGHT, andCHARINDEX/PATINDEX. All generally “good enough” functions for a lot of the things you need to do, but often woefully inadequate for parsing large amounts of text.
Yeah, T-SQL RegEx is definitely a nicer approach, though HTML doesn’t have to follow the consistency rules of XML due to browsers being very forgiving in their interpretation of the language, so it’s easy to get tangled up trying to parse websites.