SQL Server: How do you remove punctuation from a field?

Question

Any one know a good way to remove punctuation from a field in SQL Server?

I'm thinking

UPDATE tblMyTable SET FieldName = REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(FieldName,',',''),'.',''),'''' ,'')

but it seems a bit tedious when I intend on removing a large number of different characters for example: !@#$%^&*()<>:"

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Ideally, you would do this in an application language such as C# + LINQ as mentioned above.

If you wanted to do it purely in T-SQL though, one way make things neater would be to firstly create a table that held all the punctuation you wanted to removed.

CREATE TABLE Punctuation 
(
    Symbol VARCHAR(1) NOT NULL
)

INSERT INTO Punctuation (Symbol) VALUES('''')
INSERT INTO Punctuation (Symbol) VALUES('-')
INSERT INTO Punctuation (Symbol) VALUES('.')

Next, you could create a function in SQL to remove all the punctuation symbols from an input string.

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.fn_RemovePunctuation
(
    @InputString VARCHAR(500)
)
RETURNS VARCHAR(500)
AS
BEGIN
    SELECT
        @InputString = REPLACE(@InputString, P.Symbol, '')
    FROM 
        Punctuation P

    RETURN @InputString
END
GO

Then you can just call the function in your UPDATE statement

UPDATE tblMyTable SET FieldName = dbo.fn_RemovePunctuation(FieldName)