How to identify unicode text in sql?

Question

Table1 has nvarchar column called umsg which contains unicode text and some time english also.

I want to find out English text present in umsg column.

Answer 1

You did not answer what you want in case there are some unicode and some ascii characters in the same string, so I give you 1 idea and 1 solution for the case if you want only to find "pure English" or "mixed" rows.

You need a table of natural numbers to do this .In case you have no such a table you can generate it like this:

select top 1000000  row_number() over(order by getdate()) as n
into dbo.nums
from sys.messages m1 cross join sys.messages m2;

alter table dbo.nums alter column n int not null;

alter table dbo.nums add constraint PK_nums_n primary key(n); 

Now that you have a table of natural numbers we are going to decompose your strings into single characters to check if ascii(character) = unicode(character):

declare @t table(col Nvarchar(200));
insert into @t values
(N'ref no été'), (N'The livers detoxification processes.'), (N'फेंगशुई के छोटे-छोटे टिप्स से आप जीवन की विषमताओं से')

select t.col, n, substring(t.col, n, 1) as nth_character,
       ascii(substring(t.col, n, 1)) as ascii,
       unicode(substring(t.col, n, 1)) as uni
from @t t join dbo.nums n
       on n.n <= len(t.col); -- this is to give you an idea how to see if it's unicode character or ascii

with cte as
(
select t.col, n, substring(t.col, n, 1) as nth_character,
       ascii(substring(t.col, n, 1)) as ascii,
       unicode(substring(t.col, n, 1)) as uni
from @t t join dbo.nums n
       on n.n <= len(t.col)
)
select col, 
       case
            when sum(case when ascii = uni then 1 else 0 end) = count(*) then 'English only'
            else 'Not only English'
       end as eng_or_not
from cte
group by col -- row level solution

The first part of the code shows you your string character by character along with character's ascii ande unicode code: where they are the same it's ascii character.

The second part just check if all the characters are ascii.