Taking mwelcome's suggestion to a full 8000 varchar field containing only the first and last characters as non-blanks, you can:

1. Call REPLACE three times for 16 to 1
2. Call REPLACE once for...

Having suffered at the hands of "let's buy a reference table package because we don't have to build the code ourselves (i.e., do it right with normalized tables)", may I...

SO glad to see someone evaluate moving jobs in this way - it just makes a whole lot of sense.  In over 30 years in IT I've moved for the right...

Many thanks to Steve for providing the basics and for tymberwyld mentioning the "Special Cases".
It took somewhat longer than half an hour but for about four hours of...