Question

Hallo all.

I need to run the ‘replace([column], [new], [old])‘ in a query executing on n Access 2003 DB. I know of all the equivalent stuff i could use in SQL, and believe me I would love to, but i don’t have this option now. I’m trying to do a query where all the alpha chars are stripped out of a column ie. ‘[phone]‘ simply becomes ‘1111111111‘. I can also write an awsum custom VBA function and execute the query using this, but once again, can’t use these functions through JET. Any ideas?

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Thanx for the replies guys. Ok let me clarify the situation. I’m running an .NET web application. This app uses an Access 2003 db. Im trying to do an upgrade where I incorporate a type of search page. This page executes a query like: SELECT * FROM [table] WHERE replace([telnumber], ‘-‘, ”) LIKE ‘1234567890’. The problem is that there are many records in the [telnumber] column that has alpha chars in, for instance ‘[phone]’. This i need to filter out before i do the comparison. So the query using a built in VBA function executes fine when i run the query in a testing environment IN ACCESS, but when i run the query from my web app, it throws an exception stating something like “Replace function not found”. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Based on the sample query from your comment, I wonder if it could be “good enough” to rewrite your match pattern using wildcards to account for the possible non-digit characters?

SELECT * FROM [table] WHERE telnumber LIKE '*123*456*7890'