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

Having looked at all the given solutions I thought that there has to be a pure SQL method that does not require a function or a CTE / XML query, and doesn't involve difficult to maintain nested REPLACE statements. Here is my solution:

SELECT 
  x
  ,CASE WHEN a NOT LIKE '%' + SUBSTRING(x, 1, 1) + '%' THEN '' ELSE SUBSTRING(x, 1, 1) END
    + CASE WHEN a NOT LIKE '%' + SUBSTRING(x, 2, 1) + '%' THEN '' ELSE SUBSTRING(x, 2, 1) END
    + CASE WHEN a NOT LIKE '%' + SUBSTRING(x, 3, 1) + '%' THEN '' ELSE SUBSTRING(x, 3, 1) END
    + CASE WHEN a NOT LIKE '%' + SUBSTRING(x, 4, 1) + '%' THEN '' ELSE SUBSTRING(x, 4, 1) END
    + CASE WHEN a NOT LIKE '%' + SUBSTRING(x, 5, 1) + '%' THEN '' ELSE SUBSTRING(x, 5, 1) END
    + CASE WHEN a NOT LIKE '%' + SUBSTRING(x, 6, 1) + '%' THEN '' ELSE SUBSTRING(x, 6, 1) END
-- Keep adding rows until you reach the column size 
    AS stripped_column
FROM (SELECT 
        column_to_strip AS x
        ,'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' AS a 
      FROM my_table) a

The advantage of doing it this way is that the valid characters are contained in the one string in the sub query making easy to reconfigure for a different set of characters.

The downside is that you have to add a row of SQL for each character up to the size of your column. To make that task easier I just used the Powershell script below, this example if for a VARCHAR(64):

1..64 | % {
  "    + CASE WHEN a NOT LIKE '%' + SUBSTRING(x, {0}, 1) + '%' THEN '' ELSE SUBSTRING(x, {0}, 1) END" -f $_
} | clip.exe