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

If you are like me and don't have access to just add functions to your production data but still want to perform this kind of filtering, here's a pure SQL solution using a PIVOT table to put the filtered pieces back together again.

N.B. I hardcoded the table up to 40 characters, you'll have to add more if you have longer strings to filter.

SET CONCAT_NULL_YIELDS_NULL OFF;

with 
    ToBeScrubbed
as (
    select 1 as id, '*SOME 222@ !@* #* BOGUS !@*&! DATA' as ColumnToScrub
),

Scrubbed as (
    select 
        P.Number as ValueOrder,
        isnull ( substring ( t.ColumnToScrub , number , 1 ) , '' ) as ScrubbedValue,
        t.id
    from
        ToBeScrubbed t
        left join master..spt_values P
            on P.number between 1 and len(t.ColumnToScrub)
            and type ='P'
    where
        PatIndex('%[^a-z]%', substring(t.ColumnToScrub,P.number,1) ) = 0
)

SELECT
    id, 
    [1]+ [2]+ [3]+ [4]+ [5]+ [6]+ [7]+ [8] +[9] +[10]
    +  [11]+ [12]+ [13]+ [14]+ [15]+ [16]+ [17]+ [18] +[19] +[20]
    +  [21]+ [22]+ [23]+ [24]+ [25]+ [26]+ [27]+ [28] +[29] +[30]
    +  [31]+ [32]+ [33]+ [34]+ [35]+ [36]+ [37]+ [38] +[39] +[40] as ScrubbedData
FROM (
    select 
        *
    from 
        Scrubbed
    ) 
    src
    PIVOT (
        MAX(ScrubbedValue) FOR ValueOrder IN (
        [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10],
        [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20],
        [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30],
        [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40]
        )
    ) pvt