Special Characters

It might be hard to work with special characters in your data.  For instance, doing a replace on a field that looks like it has a blank (but is actually is carriage return) won’t yield the results you are seeking.  Instead, replace your special characters using the char function:

char(9) : tab

char(10): line feed

char(13) carriage return

If you want to find the others use this query:

SELECT ASCII( SUBSTRING(column_char,PATINDEX(‘%[^A-Z]%’,column_char),50))
,ASCII( SUBSTRING(column_char,PATINDEX(‘%[^A-Z]%’,column_char)+1,50))
FROM @tbl

Or if you are looking for a function I found this better approach from here by Christian d’Heureuse:

– Removes special characters from a string value.
– All characters except 0-9, a-z and A-Z are removed and
– the remaining characters are returned.
– Author: Christian d’Heureuse, http://www.source-code.biz
create function dbo.RemoveSpecialChars (@s varchar(256)) returns varchar(256)
   with schemabinding
begin
   if @s is null
      return null
   declare @s2 varchar(256)
   set @s2 = ”
   declare @l int
   set @l = len(@s)
   declare @p int
   set @p = 1
   while @p <= @l begin
      declare @c int
      set @c = ascii(substring(@s, @p, 1))
      if @c between 48 and 57 or @c between 65 and 90 or @c between 97 and 122
         set @s2 = @s2 + char(@c)
      set @p = @p + 1
      end
   if len(@s2) = 0
      return null
   return @s2
   end

Thank you Christian for this tremendous help!  (script from http://www.source-code.biz/)

(I only copy the script here in case Christian decides to take down his website as this has happened to me in the past)