Replace all varchar column declarations with a size greater than 8000

Question

I have a sql dump file from MySQL that I use to create SQL Server (2005) tables out of.

I need to change the column declarations that are greater than varchar(8000), the max for sql server 2005, to varchar(max).

I am using a Visual Basic script to parse through the dump file and make these changes. It just looks at the whole file as a string. I only want to change if the number is greater than 8000, but I don't know how to do this. Is there a way to check what that number is inside of the declaration and change it? I've made a regular expression to find the number inside the declaration. But I don't know of a way to say:

For all strings that match varchar(int>8000), change to varchar(max).

Answer 1

Regex to match a number greater than (or equal to) 8000: /^([89]\\d{3}|\\d{5,})$/

Where / is a delimiter for the regex, followed by start ( ^ ) followed by either ( (...|...) ) an 8 or 9 and 3 more digits ( [89]\\d{3} ) or five or more digits ( \\d{5,} ) followed by the end of the string ( $ ) and regex delimiter ( / ).

To use in your context, something like this should do it...

/varchar\(\s*([89]\d{3}|\d{5,})\s*\)/

This has escaped braces \\(...\\) and optional spaces \\s* and your keyword varchar