Question

Is there an efficient way using sql server 2005 to remove all characters in a string like this which are not numbers?

TEXT T EXT TEXT 2345 TEXT SDTE

I was thinking there might be a way to combine the replace statement with a regular expression.

Answer 1

Here is the answer from the related question, with the slight change needed to remove non-numbers as opposed to non-alphas:

Create Function [dbo].[RemoveNonNumericCharacters](@Temp VarChar(1000))
Returns VarChar(1000)
AS
Begin

    While PatIndex('%[^0-9]%', @Temp) > 0
        Set @Temp = Stuff(@Temp, PatIndex('%[^0-9]%', @Temp), 1, '')

    Return @Temp
End