SQL Server 2008 query to find rows containing non-alphanumeric characters in a column

Question

I was actually asked this myself a few weeks ago, whereas I know exactly how to do this with a SP or UDF but I was wondering if there was a quick and easy way of doing this

Answer 1

I found this page with quite a neat solution. What makes it great is that you get an indication of what the character is and where it is. Then it gives a super simple way to fix it (which can be combined and built into a piece of driver code to scale up it's application).

DECLARE @tablename VARCHAR(1000) ='Schema.Table'
DECLARE @columnname VARCHAR(100)='ColumnName'
DECLARE @counter INT = 0
DECLARE @sql VARCHAR(MAX)

WHILE @counter <=255
BEGIN

SET @sql=

'SELECT TOP 10 '+@columnname+','+CAST(@counter AS VARCHAR(3))+' as CharacterSet, CHARINDEX(CHAR('+CAST(@counter AS VARCHAR(3))+'),'+@columnname+') as LocationOfChar
FROM '+@tablename+'
WHERE CHARINDEX(CHAR('+CAST(@counter AS VARCHAR(3))+'),'+@columnname+') <> 0'

PRINT (@sql)
EXEC (@sql)
SET @counter = @counter + 1
END

and then...

UPDATE Schema.Table
SET ColumnName= REPLACE(Columnname,CHAR(13),'')

Credit to Ayman El-Ghazali.