How to strip all non-alphabetic characters from string in SQL Server?

Question

How could you remove all characters that are not alphabetic from a string?

What about non-alphanumeric?

Does this have to be a custom function or are there

Answer 1

Believe it or not, in my system this ugly function performs better than G Mastros elegant one.

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.RemoveSpecialChar (@s VARCHAR(256)) 
RETURNS VARCHAR(256) 
WITH SCHEMABINDING
    BEGIN
        IF @s IS NULL
            RETURN NULL
        DECLARE @s2 VARCHAR(256) = '',
                @l INT = LEN(@s),
                @p INT = 1

        WHILE @p <= @l
            BEGIN
                DECLARE @c INT
                SET @c = ASCII(SUBSTRING(@s, @p, 1))
                IF @c BETWEEN 48 AND 57
                   OR  @c BETWEEN 65 AND 90
                   OR  @c BETWEEN 97 AND 122
                    SET @s2 = @s2 + CHAR(@c)
                SET @p = @p + 1
            END

        IF LEN(@s2) = 0
            RETURN NULL

        RETURN @s2