Formating single line of text field inside SSRS report

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Posted on by Community Member Microsoft Employee

I have a field with fixed length of 20 characters. Field type is Single Line of Text.

ABCD1234ABCD1234ABCD

I would like to split this string in 5 different pieces like this ABCD 1234 ABCD 1234 ABCD.
One empty space after every 4 characters. This string has no any delimiter, it's only letters and numbers.

Could this maybe be achieved by using standard format function?

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Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Formating single line of text field inside SSRS report

This is exactly the function that was needed. Thanks a lot Wahaj. I was not aware that this function exist.
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Wahaj Rashid 11,319 on at

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RE: Formating single line of text field inside SSRS report

Hi,

Thank you for your query.

As you do not have any delimiter, you can split.

Because the length is fixed, you can use MID function in SSRS which is equivalent to SUBSTRING.

Here us the example expression:

=MID(Fields!StringData.Value, 1, 4) & " " & MID(Fields!StringData.Value, 5, 4) & " " & MID(Fields!StringData.Value, 9, 4) & " " & MID(Fields!StringData.Value, 13, 4) & " " & MID(Fields!StringData.Value, 17, 4)

This shows following output:

You can also use the same expression to show this in separate columns:

If you are using this value multiple times in the report, it is better to do it in the SQL query:

SELECT CONCAT( SUBSTRING('ABCD1234ABCD1234ABCD', 1, 4), ' ', SUBSTRING('ABCD1234ABCD1234ABCD', 5, 4), ' ', SUBSTRING('ABCD1234ABCD1234ABCD', 9, 4), ' ', SUBSTRING('ABCD1234ABCD1234ABCD', 13, 4), ' ', SUBSTRING('ABCD1234ABCD1234ABCD', 17, 4) ) AS FormattedValue