Question

I’m trying to filter a VARCHAR column where the first letter is NOT an alpha.

Ex.
values = [‘.net’, ’30 days’, ‘apple’, ‘beta’]

returns [‘.net’, ’30 days’]

Note: for reference this is to group the names into filter buckets by first letter, where anything not an alpha character is grouped into ‘#’ (think iPhone Contacts Browse grouping).

Filtering on a single alpha is easy with LIKE or substring, but I can’t find a simple way to filter for ALL non-alpha characters.

EDIT: It is case-sensitive, but I’m expecting all lower-case, all the time.

Answer 1

Is the solution as easy as:

SELECT * 
FROM SomeTable 
WHERE SomeColumn NOT LIKE '[A-z]%'

?

EDIT: Changed [A-Z] to [A-z] just in case you’re using a case-sensitive collation.