expression1

An expression that contains the sequence of characters to be found. The expression1 argument is an expression of the ntext type or a data type that can be implicitly converted to nvarchar.

expression2

An expression that is typically a column searched for the specified sequence. The expression2 argument is an expression of the ntext type or a data type that can be implicitly converted to nvarchar.

start_location

The character position from which to start searching for expression1 in expression2. If start_location is not given, is a negative number, or is 0, the search starts at the beginning of expression2. The start_location argument can be tinyint, smallint, int, or bigint.

int

The following example searches for the expression "an" from the last names of the employees in a database.

SELECT [Last Name], CHARINDEX('an', [Last Name]) AS Position
FROM Employees

This is the result set:

Last Name..............Position
------------------------------
Davolio           0
Fuller            0
Leverling         0
Peacock           0
Buchanan          5
Suyama            0
King              0
Callahan          7
Dodsworth         0
Hellstern         0
Smith             0
Patterson         0
Brid              0
Martin            0
Pereira           0