Rick Caminiti dotCOM

Ok, well, this might now be the “equivalent”, and I don’t yet have a solution for LPAD without using a Custom Function, but here’s what I did to perform an RPAD for something I was doing.

I had 2 int fields that I needed to concatenate together. The max size on both were 3 digits, so I decided to make my joint combination of the two keys both 3 digits so keep it as a smart key, always knowing the first 3 meant something and the last 3 meant something in the source databases. Again, these were ints, and I need the combination of the two to be ints.
Forgive the formatting, I’m TRYING to make it easier to read:

select
  cast(
   replace( /*replace spaces with 0s*/
    cast([col1] as nchar(3)) /*casting as nchar to provide training spaces*/
    , ' '
    , '0') +
   replace(
    cast(isnull(col2)], 0) as nchar(3)) --second field is nullable (left join), make them 0s
    , ' '
    , '0')
  as int) /*casting it back to an int*/
from table