I would like to take a field and replace all characters that are not between a-z and A-Z with "".
Is this possible, and if so, how?
I would like to take a field and replace all characters that are not between a-z and A-Z with "".
Is this possible, and if so, how?
You could create a CLR
stored procedure to do the regular expression replacement. Here's an article on that topic: http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/jeffs/archive/2007/04/27/SQL-2005-Regular-Expression-Replace.aspx
Then you could do something like this:
UPDATE your_table SET col1 = dbo.RegExReplace(col1, '[^A-Za-z]','');
EDIT: Since CLR
isn't an option, check out this link, there is a dbo.RegexReplace
function there which is written in t-sql, not CLR. You could use that function in the following manner:
First, you need to run this to enable Ole:
sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1; GO RECONFIGURE; GO sp_configure 'Ole Automation Procedures', 1; GO RECONFIGURE; GO
Then create the dbo.RegexReplace
function given at the link I provided.
Then you can do this:
create table your_table(col1 varchar(500)) go insert into your_table values ('aBCCa1234!!fAkk9943'); update your_table set col1 = dbo.RegexReplace('[^A-Za-z]','',col1,1,1); select * from your_table Result: aBCCafAkk
You could try creating a UDF (user defined function) and then use it in your queries:
Then do a query similar to:
SELECT * FROM myTable WHERE find_regular_expression(myCol, '[^a-zA-Z]')
It also appears the there may be more native support in later versions of SQL Server, certainly 2008 R2, through the mdq.RegexMatches function (Part of Master Data Services).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee633829(SQL.105).aspx