Question

I have a table with several varchar columns that are almost identical to primary keys I have in another table, with the exception of a period (.). I’ve looked at the replace function in T-SQL but the first argument isn’t an expression. How can I remove all occurrences of a particular character with SQL? It seems like the correct answer might be to replace with a zero length string. Is that close?

To whomever felt the question didn’t exhibit research effort it was mainly due to a misunderstanding of the documentation itself.

Answer 1

You can update the table directly using REPLACE on the column values:

UPDATE myTable
SET myColumn = REPLACE(myColumn, '.', '')