Question

I have a table with 600+ columns imported from a CSV file with special chars % _ - in the column names.
Is there a way to change the column names to remove these special chars?

The code can be in T-SQL.

Answer 1

You can query INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS and generate sp_rename scripts to rename the columns.

SELECT 'EXEC sp_rename ''' + TABLE_NAME + '.' + QUOTENAME(COLUMN_NAME) + ''', ''' + REPLACE(COLUMN_NAME, '%', '') + ''', ''COLUMN''; '
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE COLUMN_NAME LIKE '%[%]%'

Here’s a permalink to an actual runnable example