Question

I have a table in Oracle with a VARCHAR column called DESCRIPTION. Some of the rows contain non-printable characters such as the character with numeric value 150 (which is not in Latin-1 and is “Start of Protected Area” in Unicode).

I want to select all the rows whose DESCRIPTION columns contain a character whose numeric value is between 128 and 160. Is there a way to do this without a long list of LIKE clauses OR’ed together? I suppose it can be done with regular expressions, but I haven’t found a way to do it.

Answer 1

I had to do something very like this recently and used some SQL like this:

with codes as (select rownum code from dual connect by level <= 160)
select distinct t.id, t.description
from mytable t, codes c
where t.description like '%' || chr(c.code) || '%'
and c.code >= 128;