Question

I’m working on a project where we have to figure out if a given field is potentially a company name versus an address.

In taking a very broad swipe at it, we are going under the assumption that if this field contains no numbers, odds are it is a name vs. a street address (we’re aiming for the 80% case, knowing some will have to be done manually).

So now to the question at hand. Given a table with, for the sake of simplicity, a single varchar(100) column, how could I find those records who have no numeric characters at any position within the field?

For example:

"Main Street, Suite 10A" --Do not return this.
"A++ Billing" --Should be returned
"XYZ Corporation" --Should be returned
"100 First Ave, Apt 20" --Should not be returned

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Sql Server allows for a regex-like syntax for range [0-9] or Set [0123456789] to be specified in a LIKE operator, which can be used with the any string wildcard (%). For example:

select * from Address where StreetAddress not like '%[0-9]%';

The wildcard % at the start of the like will obviously hurt performance (Scans are likely), but in your case this seems inevitable.

Another MSDN Reference.