Regex pattern inside SQL Replace function?

Question

SELECT REPLACE(\'100.00 GB\', \'%^(^-?\\d*\\.{0,1}\\d+$)%\', \'\');

I want to replace any markup between two

Answer 1

I stumbled across this post looking for something else but thought I'd mention a solution I use which is far more efficient - and really should be the default implementation of any function when used with a set based query - which is to use a cross applied table function. Seems the topic is still active so hopefully this is useful to someone.

Example runtime on a few of the answers so far based on running recursive set based queries or scalar function, based on 1m rows test set removing the chars from a random newid, ranges from 34s to 2m05s for the WHILE loop examples and from 1m3s to {forever} for the function examples.

Using a table function with cross apply achieves the same goal in 10s. You may need to adjust it to suit your needs such as the max length it handles.

Function:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[RemoveChars](@InputUnit VARCHAR(40))
RETURNS TABLE
AS
RETURN
    (
        WITH Numbers_prep(Number) AS
            (
                SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 1
            )
        ,Numbers(Number) AS
            (
                SELECT TOP (ISNULL(LEN(@InputUnit),0))
                    row_number() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT NULL))
                FROM Numbers_prep a
                    CROSS JOIN Numbers_prep b
            )
        SELECT
            OutputUnit
        FROM
            (
                SELECT
                    substring(@InputUnit,Number,1)
                FROM  Numbers
                WHERE substring(@InputUnit,Number,1) like '%[0-9]%'
                ORDER BY Number
                FOR XML PATH('')
            ) Sub(OutputUnit)
    )

Usage:

UPDATE t
SET column = o.OutputUnit
FROM ##t t
CROSS APPLY [dbo].[RemoveChars](t.column) o