Remove Non-Alphabet Characters from a String–SQL Server

Suppose you have a string that contains numbers and other special characters and you want to keep only alphabets and remove all the other characters. One way to do this is to use a while loop that parses each character

Here is the code for the same

declare @str varchar(20)
set @str='ab12#89L(h12k'
Select @str as 'Original String'
declare @temp_str varchar(20), @i int
select @temp_str ='',@i=1
while @i<=len(@str)
begin
    set @temp_str=@temp_str+case when substring(@str,@i,1) like '[a-zA-Z]' then substring(@str,@i,1) else '' end
    set @i=@i+1
end
select @temp_str as 'String with Alphabets'

The code inside the While loop takes each character and check if it is in the range a-z or A-Z and appends that character with another variable. Other characters will not get appended. So at the end of while loop, the second variable will have only alphabets.

About The Author

Madhivanan,an MSc computer Science graduate from Chennai-India, works as a works as a Lead Subject Matter Expert at a company that simplifies BIG data. He started his career as a developer working with Visual Basic 6.0, SQL Server 2000 and Crystal Report 8. As years went by, he started working more on writing queries in SQL Server. He now has good level of knowledge in SQLServer, Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL as well. He is also one of the leading posters at www.sqlteam.com and a moderator at www.sql-server-performance.com. His T-sql blog is at http://beyondrelational.com/blogs/madhivanan