Problem:
Limit the value of a VARCHAR
variable (or a column) to digits and ASCI characters, but allow variable length.
This script will not yield required result:
declare @var as VARCHAR (150)
select @var = '123ABC'
if (@var LIKE '[a-zA-Z0-9]{0,150}')
print 'OK'
else
print 'Not OK'
Anyone have idea how to do this?
You can do this with the not carat ^, and a NOT LIKE expression.
So you say, where not like not non-alphanumeric ;) This works for standard numbers & characters:
declare @var as VARCHAR (150)
select @var = '123ABC'
if (@var NOT LIKE '%[^a-zA-Z0-9]%')
print 'OK'
else
print 'Not OK'
Edit: Thanks Martin for the collation hint, if you want the characters like ý treated as non-alphanumeric add in the COLLATE as below
declare @var as VARCHAR (150)
select @var = '123ABCý'
if (@var NOT LIKE '%[^a-zA-Z0-9]%' COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN )
print 'OK'
else
print 'Not OK'
Will this help
Declare @t table (Alphanumeric VARCHAR(100))
Insert Into @t
Select '123ABCD' Union All Select 'ABC' Union All
Select '123' Union All Select '123ABCý' Union All
Select 'a-z123' Union All Select 'abc123' Union All
Select 'a1b2c3d4'
SELECT Alphanumeric
FROM @t
WHERE Alphanumeric LIKE '%[a-zA-Z0-9]%'
AND ( Alphanumeric NOT LIKE '%[^0-9a-zA-Z]%' COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN)
AND LEN(Alphanumeric)> 6 -- display records having more than a length of 6
//Result
Alphanumeric
123ABCD
a1b2c3d4
N.B.~ Used Martin's collation hint..Thanks
T-SQL doesn't support RegEx.
You can use SQL CLR to run such expression though.
Also try the LEN function:
if (LEN(@var) <= 150)
print 'OK'
else
print 'Not OK'
T-SQL doesn't support regex, closest you can get is the PATHINDEX
function that you can use to match specific characters, but you can't specify the count.
You can try combining it with LEN
function to check the length.
EDIT: Check this page for a few examples of PATINDEX
.