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Is there a smarter way to remove all special characters rather than having a series of about 15 nested replace statements?
The following works, but only handles three characters (ampersand, blank and period).
select CustomerID, CustomerName,
Replace(Replace(Replace(CustomerName,'&',''),' ',''),'.','') as CustomerNameStripped
from Customer
342
A common solution to remove all non-alphanumeric characters from a String is with regular expressions. The idea is to use the regular expression [^A-Za-z0-9] to retain only alphanumeric characters in the string. You can also use [^\w] regular expression, which is equivalent to [^a-zA-Z_0-9] .
In some situations, we may not want a space or another special character, so we can include the special character that we want to exclude in our not regular expression, such as [^A-Z0-9 ] to exclude a space.
One flexible-ish way;
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[fnRemovePatternFromString](@BUFFER VARCHAR(MAX), @PATTERN VARCHAR(128)) RETURNS VARCHAR(MAX) AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @POS INT = PATINDEX(@PATTERN, @BUFFER)
WHILE @POS > 0 BEGIN
SET @BUFFER = STUFF(@BUFFER, @POS, 1, '')
SET @POS = PATINDEX(@PATTERN, @BUFFER)
END
RETURN @BUFFER
END
select dbo.fnRemovePatternFromString('cake & beer $3.99!?c', '%[$&.!?]%')
(No column name)
cake beer 399c
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