LIKE 'VC<blank or w>-...'

• Ninja's_RGR'us

  SSC Guru

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  March 17, 2010 at 7:53 pm

  #230974

  Hi guys is there any way to do a pattern search for any single character... or no character at all without using %?

  I have a trace running on a server and the search queries I need to parse are like 20 pages long... so you can imagine how many occurances of spaces, dashes and quotes I have in there.

  I need to search for an order number with this pattern (notice the quote at the end).

  VC[nothing or W]<DASH>[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]<DASH>[0-9][0-9]'

  Since I didn't want to do an or condition I instead went with REPLACE (@string, 'VCW', 'VC') and it solved it but I'm wondering if there's a better way.

  My other challenge is that if I use a % for the nothing or w part I get a false positive further in the string.

• Paul White

  SSC Guru

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  March 17, 2010 at 11:50 pm

  #1135745

  Can't think of a direct T-SQL method, given the conditions, aside from to use regular expressions via a CLR routine.

  Paul White
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