Get the Nth Token from a Delimited String

Before STRING_SPLIT existed, extracting a specific token from a delimited string required cursors or messy nested CHARINDEX calls. This function uses a recursive CTE to walk the delimiters and return whichever token you ask for by ordinal position - 1-based.

Example: SELECT dbo.GetToken('one,two,three,four', ',', 3) -- returns three

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.[GetToken] (@String NVarChar(4000), @Delimiter NVarChar(4000), @Ordinal int) 
RETURNS NVarChar(1000) AS
BEGIN
    DECLARE @Result VarChar(4000);

	WITH t(string, starts, pos, idx) as
	(
        SELECT @String, 1, charindex(@Delimiter, @String), 0 
        UNION ALL
        SELECT
			@String, pos + 1, charindex(@Delimiter, @String, pos + 1), idx + 1 
        FROM
			t 
        WHERE
			pos > 0
    )

    SELECT
		@Result = substring(string, starts, case when pos > 0 then pos - starts else len(string) end)
    FROM
		t
    WHERE
		idx = @Ordinal;

	RETURN @Result
END
GO