Something like charIndex, but in a variable...

[Malte Brill]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Need some time to try them out. I really like Thierrys RegEx approach and the others look promissing too.

@Walt: In the real live Scenario I try to colorize Structured Data (e.G. XML, but others too). I need to walk through the whole dataset token by token and really have the token number I am interested in. I need to find the start and end position inside of the dataset (e.G. token 79 starts at char 400 and ends at 402). 
The datasets can potentially be huge. A field would add quite a bit of overhead here, which I am not necessariely keen on. :-)
Also the dataset *might* be that huge and to make it worse actually be on a single line, that a field would cut off some of the data, while a variable would not. 

Ultimate goal is to have a tiny text editor, that can colorize the data and point out where in the data it is potentionally malformed and ideally what the error is.

All the best,

Malte