ListFirst, ListRest in SQL Server

So, this has probably been done a million times before, but I needed ColdFusion-style ListFirst and ListRest functions for creating a stored procedure in a database that violates First Normal Form. <sigh/>

Note that the behavior varies slightly from CF. The delimiter is forced to be a comma, and multiple consecutive delimiters are treated as multiple elements. (CF eating 3 commas at a time always annoyed me.)

So, here's the DDL for them:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[listFirst] (@list nvarchar(4000))
RETURNS nvarchar(4000)
AS BEGIN
   DECLARE @pos int
   DECLARE @ret nvarchar(4000)
   SET @pos = charindex(',', @list)
   IF @pos > 0
       SET @ret = left(@list, @pos-1)
   ELSE
       set @ret = @list
   RETURN @ret
END


CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[listRest] (@list nvarchar(4000))
RETURNS nvarchar(4000)
AS BEGIN
   DECLARE @pos int
   DECLARE @ret nvarchar(4000)
   SET @pos = charindex(',', @list)
   IF @pos > 0
       SET @ret = substring(@list, @pos+1, len(@list)-@pos)
   ELSE
       SET @ret = ''
   RETURN @ret
END

As a side note, it just occurred to me that you can probably work around the multiple consecutive delimiter thing by adding whitespace, then trimming:

<cfloop list="#replace(myList, ",", ", ", "ALL")#" index="item">
   <cfset item=trim(item) />
   ...
</cfloop>

Why didn't I think of that years ago?