Find all special characters in a column in SQL Server 2008

Question

I need to find the occurrence of all special characters in a column in SQL Server 2008. So, I don\'t care about A, B, C ... 8, 9, 0, but I do care

Answer 1

Negatives are your friend here:

SELECT Col1
FROM TABLE
WHERE Col1 like '%[^a-Z0-9]%'

Which says that you want any rows where Col1 consists of any number of characters, then one character not in the set a-Z0-9, and then any number of characters.

If you have a case sensitive collation, it's important that you use a range that includes both upper and lower case A, a, Z and z, which is what I've given (originally I had it the wrong way around. a comes before A. Z comes after z)

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Or, to put it another way, you could have written your original WHERE as:

Col1 LIKE '[!@#$%]'

But, as you observed, you'd need to know all of the characters to include in the [].