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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T07:32:36+00:00

Hi I am trying to find all rows in my database (SQL Server) which

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Hi I am trying to find all rows in my database (SQL Server) which have character é in their text by executing the following queries.

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t_question WHERE patindex(N'%[\xE9]%',question) > 0;

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t_question WHERE patindex(N'%[\u00E9]%',question) > 0;

But I found two problems: (a) Both of them are returning different number of rows and (b) They are returning rows which do not have the specified character.

Is the way I am constructing the regular expression and comparing the Unicode correct?

EDIT:

The question column is stored using datatype nvarchar.
The following query gives the correct result though.

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t_question WHERE question LIKE N'%é%';
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Why not use SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t_question WHERE question LIKE N'%é%'?

    NB: Likeand patindex do not accept regular expressions.

    In the SQL Server pattern syntax [\xE9] means match any single character within the specified set. i.e. match \, x, E or 9. So any of the following strings would match that pattern.

    • “Elephant”
    • “axis”
    • “99.9”
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