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

Using a CTE generated numbers table to examine each character, then FOR XML to concat to a string of kept values you can...

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[PatRemove](
    @pattern varchar(50),
    @expression varchar(8000) 
    )
RETURNS varchar(8000)
AS
BEGIN
    WITH 
        d(d) AS (SELECT d FROM (VALUES (0),(1),(2),(3),(4),(5),(6),(7),(8),(9)) digits(d)),
        nums(n) AS (SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT NULL)) FROM d d1, d d2, d d3, d d4),
        chars(c) AS (SELECT SUBSTRING(@expression, n, 1) FROM nums WHERE n <= LEN(@expression))
    SELECT 
        @expression = (SELECT c AS [text()] FROM chars WHERE c NOT LIKE @pattern FOR XML PATH(''));

    RETURN @expression;
END