Short and Sweet – Implementing simple character masking without UDFs

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus with the move to California and figuring out my new life here.

I needed some inline TSQL to mask a string based on a simple masking input, like ‘##xx##’ where # would return data and X would return X.

Here’s the code, actually a bit simpler than I thought it would be.

The first table would be the one you would be using (I used sys.objects as an example), and if you wanted to store a masking string then you’d just want to make sure it was joined and projected in the substring instead of the @formatstring.