How to strip the trailing slash off a URL in SQL

Posted written by Paul Seal on May 17, 2022 SQL

Today I needed to remove the trailing slash off a URL in SQL

Did you know Skybrud Redirects package doesn't like trailing slashes in the Url column (the from URL)?

If you add redirects to the database yourself, they won't work with a trailing slash. So I needed to fix the data.

First of all I needed to make sure my WHERE criteria was correct. Here is a SELECT query with the correct WHERE criteria

SELECT [Url] oldUrl
FROM SkybrudRedirects
WHERE [Url] LIKE '%/' AND LEN([Url]) > 1

Next I wrote another SELECT statement to show what the new url would look like next to the old one.

SELECT [Url] oldUrl, LEFT([Url], LEN([Url]) -1) newUrl 
FROM SkybrudRedirects
WHERE [Url] LIKE '%/' AND LEN([Url]) > 1

Finally I wrote the UPDATE statement to make the change

UPDATE SkybrudRedirects
SET [Url] = LEFT([Url], LEN([Url]) -1)
WHERE [Url] LIKE '%/' AND LEN([Url]) > 1

All done. I ran the original SELECT query to make sure they were all gone now and they were.

I hope this helps someone else, probably just me in 6 months.