How to strip all non-alphabetic characters from string in SQL Server?

Question

How could you remove all characters that are not alphabetic from a string?

What about non-alphanumeric?

Does this have to be a custom function or are there

Answer 1

Here's a solution that doesn't require creating a function or listing all instances of characters to replace. It uses a recursive WITH statement in combination with a PATINDEX to find unwanted chars. It will replace all unwanted chars in a column - up to 100 unique bad characters contained in any given string. (E.G. "ABC123DEF234" would contain 4 bad characters 1, 2, 3 and 4) The 100 limit is the maximum number of recursions allowed in a WITH statement, but this doesn't impose a limit on the number of rows to process, which is only limited by the memory available.
If you don't want DISTINCT results, you can remove the two options from the code.

-- Create some test data:
SELECT * INTO #testData 
FROM (VALUES ('ABC DEF,K.l(p)'),('123H,J,234'),('ABCD EFG')) as t(TXT)

-- Actual query:
-- Remove non-alpha chars: '%[^A-Z]%'
-- Remove non-alphanumeric chars: '%[^A-Z0-9]%'
DECLARE @BadCharacterPattern VARCHAR(250) = '%[^A-Z]%';

WITH recurMain as (
    SELECT DISTINCT CAST(TXT AS VARCHAR(250)) AS TXT, PATINDEX(@BadCharacterPattern, TXT) AS BadCharIndex
    FROM #testData
    UNION ALL
    SELECT CAST(TXT AS VARCHAR(250)) AS TXT, PATINDEX(@BadCharacterPattern, TXT) AS BadCharIndex
    FROM (
        SELECT 
            CASE WHEN BadCharIndex > 0 
                THEN REPLACE(TXT, SUBSTRING(TXT, BadCharIndex, 1), '')
                ELSE TXT 
            END AS TXT
        FROM recurMain
        WHERE BadCharIndex > 0
    ) badCharFinder
)
SELECT DISTINCT TXT
FROM recurMain
WHERE BadCharIndex = 0;