Deleting Leading Zeros in a String (SQL)

A common issue while importing data from different source into SQL Server is often numbers get prefixed with zeroes. If you want to delete these leading zeroes in a string, you can use the following methods:

Method 1 : CAST to Bigint

declare @s varchar(100)
set @s ='0000004007340007402100'
select cast(@s as bigint)

CASTing the string to Bigint will automatically delete the leading zeroes



Method 2 : Use Replace function

declare @s varchar(100)
set @s ='0000004007340007402100'
select replace(ltrim(replace(@s,'0',' ')),' ','0')

The T-SQL code shown above first replaces all zeroes to a single space. The LTRIM function deletes all leading spaces and the second replace function, replaces all spaces to zeroes, so that all leading zeroes are deleted.

OUTPUT