Find non-ASCII characters in varchar columns using SQL Server

Question

How can rows with non-ASCII characters be returned using SQL Server?
If you can show how to do it for one column would be great.

I am doing something like this

Answer 1

To find which field has invalid characters:

SELECT * FROM Staging.APARMRE1 FOR XML AUTO, TYPE

You can test it with this query:

SELECT top 1 'char 31: '+char(31)+' (hex 0x1F)' field
from sysobjects
FOR XML AUTO, TYPE

The result will be:

Msg 6841, Level 16, State 1, Line 3 FOR XML could not serialize the data for node 'field' because it contains a character (0x001F) which is not allowed in XML. To retrieve this data using FOR XML, convert it to binary, varbinary or image data type and use the BINARY BASE64 directive.

It is very useful when you write xml files and get error of invalid characters when validate it.