Question

I am trying to write a SQL Query to find return all matching values as search, assuming we ignore all special chararters. So the expression should ‘strip out special chars treat the data as if all A-Z or 0-9 chars are all together with no whitespace before, after or between any chars.

for example,

DB Data

123-frs%AZ

1.2.3#frsAZ

123frs AZ

I want to enter a search for ‘123frsaz’ and it should return all rows.

Answer 1

That would be something like:

select * from thetable
where lower(regexp_replace(thecolumn, '[^[:alnum:]]+', '', 1, 0)) = '123frsaz';

[^[:alnum:]]+ means any non alphanumeric character, once or more: replace them with nothing. If the result is the same as your input text, you have a match.

Demo:

SQL> select * from foo;

BAR
--------------------
123-frs%AZ
1.2.3#frsAZ
123frs AZ
123frsaz but no luck

SQL> select * from foo where lower(regexp_replace(bar, '[^[:alnum:]]+', '', 1, 0)) = '123frsaz';

BAR
--------------------
123-frs%AZ
1.2.3#frsAZ
123frs AZ