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

From performance perspective I'd use Inline Function:

SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[udf_RemoveNumericCharsFromString]
(
@List NVARCHAR(4000)
)
RETURNS TABLE 
AS RETURN

    WITH GetNums AS (
       SELECT TOP(ISNULL(DATALENGTH(@List), 0))
        n = ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY (SELECT NULL))
        FROM
          (VALUES (0),(0),(0),(0)) d (n),
          (VALUES (0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0)) e (n),
          (VALUES (0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0)) f (n),
          (VALUES (0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0),(0)) g (n)
            )

    SELECT StrOut = ''+
        (SELECT Chr
         FROM GetNums
            CROSS APPLY (SELECT SUBSTRING(@List , n,1)) X(Chr)
         WHERE Chr LIKE '%[^0-9]%' 
         ORDER BY N
         FOR XML PATH (''),TYPE).value('.','NVARCHAR(MAX)')


   /*How to Use
   SELECT StrOut FROM dbo.udf_RemoveNumericCharsFromString ('vv45--9gut')
   Result: vv--gut
   */