SQL Server - 将逗号分隔的字符串列转换为JSON数组到新列

Question

I have a SQL Server database with a column called Categories containing comma-separated values in the format nvarchar(50) . The length of each column is variable from record to record.

I've created a new empty column called CategoriesJSONArray . For all existing records, I need to convert the values in Categories to JSON arrays and write those converted values to CategoriesJSONArray .

How would I accomplish this using T-SQL, or from within the SSMS UI?

EDIT: example, as requested

Current:

Record   Categories

1        Sales, Support, Growth
2        Sales, Growth
3        Sales
4        Support, Growth, Sustain

Desired:

Record   Categories                  CategoriesJSONArray

1        Sales, Support, Growth      { "Sales" : "Support" : "Growth"}
2        Sales, Growth               { "Sales" : "Growth"}
3        Sales                       { "Sales" }
4        Support, Growth, Sustain    { "Sales" : "Growth" : "Sustain"}

Answer 1

There's some ways to split a delimited string into records and then aggregate those back into JSON, but I think some concatenation and replacing would be a easier here:

SELECT record,
    Categories,
    '{"' + REPLACE(Categories, ', ', '":"') + '"}' as CategoriesJSONArray
FROM table

That may need some tweaking to deal with spaces and whatnot and it obviously won't work if your JSON becomes more complex, but it's quick and dirty.