How to remove accents and all chars <> a..z in sql-server?

Question

I need to do the following modifications to a varchar(20) field:

1. substitute accents with normal letters (like è to e)
2. after (1) remove all the chars not in a..z

for example

'aèàç=.32s df'  

must become

'aeacsdf' 

are there special stored functions to achieve this easily?

UPDATE: please provide a T-SQL not CLR solution. This is the workaround I temporarly did because it temporarly suits my needs, anyway using a more elegant approach would be better.

CREATE FUNCTION sf_RemoveExtraChars (@NAME nvarchar(50)) RETURNS nvarchar(50) AS BEGIN   declare @TempString nvarchar(100)   set @TempString = @NAME    set @TempString = LOWER(@TempString)   set @TempString =  replace(@TempString,' ', '')   set @TempString =  replace(@TempString,'à', 'a')   set @TempString =  replace(@TempString,'è', 'e')   set @TempString =  replace(@TempString,'é', 'e')   set @TempString =  replace(@TempString,'ì', 'i')   set @TempString =  replace(@TempString,'ò', 'o')   set @TempString =  replace(@TempString,'ù', 'u')   set @TempString =  replace(@TempString,'ç', 'c')   set @TempString =  replace(@TempString,'''', '')   set @TempString =  replace(@TempString,'`', '')   set @TempString =  replace(@TempString,'-', '')   return @TempString END GO 

Answer 1

The best way to achieve this is very simple and efficient :

SELECT 'àéêöhello!' Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1253_CI_AI 

which outputs 'aeeohello!'

The string must not be unicode. If you have a nvarchar just cast it to varchar before using the collate.

Here is a function that answers the OP needs :

create function [dbo].[RemoveExtraChars] ( @p_OriginalString varchar(50) ) returns varchar(50) as begin    declare @i int = 1;  -- must start from 1, as SubString is 1-based   declare @OriginalString varchar(100) = @p_OriginalString Collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1253_CI_AI;   declare @ModifiedString varchar(100) = '';    while @i <= Len(@OriginalString)   begin     if SubString(@OriginalString, @i, 1) like '[a-Z]'     begin       set @ModifiedString = @ModifiedString + SubString(@OriginalString, @i, 1);     end     set @i = @i + 1;   end    return @ModifiedString  end 

Then, the command:

select dbo.RemoveExtraChars('aèàç=.32s df') 

outputs

aeacsdf