Find distinct special characters in column

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Find distinct special characters in column

rahulmshewale

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Points: 454
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October 29, 2013 at 2:45 am

#285261

Hi All,
I tried to find relevant thread but did not find anything that answers my question. Appreciate if one of you can help me out either direct me to the thread or help me in finding the solution.
I have a table from which I need to extract all special characters being used in a column.
I tried with Tally table concepts and also tried with regex, but regex is not a feasible solution as I need all special characters being used in column.

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Koen Verbeeck SSC Guru Points: 259197 More actions · Answer 1

What are these special characters?

Can you give some sample data and desired output?

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My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP

rahulmshewale SSC-Addicted Points: 454 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks for your prompt reply..

I have a column UserID in USer table which accepts all characters.

I have to Identify all special characters that are already present in production db in User_ID column and list them out.

For Instance :

SELECT USER_ID FROM dbo.USERS WHERE USERID = 'testUser$'

The desired output should be : $

but this I need to make generic..

Koen Verbeeck SSC Guru Points: 259197 More actions · Answer 3

Do you store a list somewhere that defines all the special characters?

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My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP

rahulmshewale SSC-Addicted Points: 454 More actions · Answer 4

No.

Let me correct to get it more clear..

SELECT USER_ID FROM dbo.USERS WHERE USERID = 'testUser$'

User Table :

ID USer_ID CreatedDate

1 'test123$' 2013-10-29 14:38:54.947

2 'test!234' 2013-10-29 14:38:54.947

3 'test€123' 2013-10-29 14:38:54.947

the output should be :

$

!

€

i.e. all special characters those are used in User_Id should be listed

Koen Verbeeck SSC Guru Points: 259197 More actions · Answer 5

I'll rephrase my question:

How do you define what is a special character and what not?

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My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP

rahulmshewale SSC-Addicted Points: 454 More actions · Answer 6

We are currently referring extended ASCII codes (character code 128-255) as extended special characters, in short all characters except [a-z A-Z 0-9] we r treating them as special characters