Splitting a STRING in BigQuery

UpdatedMarch 2, 2026

•1 min read

Constantin Lungu

Senior Data Engineer • Contractor / Freelancer • GCP & AWS Certified

Part of seriesPractical SQL

Splitting a string in BigQuery works pretty much the same as in Excel.

SPLIT works in a similar way as its Excel cousin TEXTSPLIT - taking a string to be split and a delimiter (can be multiple characters), and returns an array of elements.

You can access them using the 0-based index or check out my previous post on more options for accessing array elements in BigQuery.

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