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

This solution, inspired by Mr. Allen's solution, requires a Numbers table of integers (which you should have on hand if you want to do serious query operations with good performance). It does not require a CTE. You can change the NOT IN (...) expression to exclude specific characters, or change it to an IN (...) OR LIKE expression to retain only certain characters.

SELECT (
    SELECT  SUBSTRING([YourString], N, 1)
    FROM    dbo.Numbers
    WHERE   N > 0 AND N <= CONVERT(INT, LEN([YourString]))
        AND SUBSTRING([YourString], N, 1) NOT IN ('(',')',',','.')
    FOR XML PATH('')
) AS [YourStringTransformed]
FROM ...