Question

We have some input data that sometimes appears with &nbsp characters on the end.

The data comes in from the source system as varchar() and our attempts to cast as decimal fail b/c of these characters.

Ltrim and Rtrim don’t remove the characters, so we’re forced to do something like:

UPDATE myTable SET myColumn = replace(myColumn,char(160),'') WHERE charindex(char(160),myColumn) > 0 

This works for the &nbsp, but is there a good way to do this for any non-alphanumeric (or in this case numeric) characters?

Answer 1

This page has a sample of how you can remove non-alphanumeric chars:

-- Put something like this into a user function: DECLARE @cString    VARCHAR(32) DECLARE @nPos    INTEGER SELECT  @cString = '90$%45623 *6%}~:@' SELECT  @nPos = PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', @cString)  WHILE @nPos > 0 BEGIN SELECT @cString = STUFF(@cString, @nPos, 1, '') SELECT  @nPos = PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%', @cString) END  SELECT @cString