What does ''%[^0-9]%'' mean?

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What does ''%[^0-9]%'' mean?

Greg Norris-214114

SSC Eights!

Points: 888
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March 11, 2005 at 10:23 am

#65827

I would be grateful if someone would please explain what the following code actually means. I'm a software developer with 3 weeks experience. I'm learning to write Stored Procs for SQL Server 2000 at my new job. I was about to write an isInteger function, but I found a script here on sqlservercentral.com, called isInteger, submitted by AFPeterson. I tested the code, it works like a charm, but how?
It appears to contain a regular expression, but I had the impression that Transact-SQL had no support for regex. If it does, would someone please point me to some tutorials/resources/articles? I haven't been able to find anything other than 3rd party plugins. I used regex a couple of times in Perl, and love the power it offers.
Anyway, what does '%[^0-9]%' mean?
CODE:
BEGIN
DECLARE @bitReturn bit
IF @strToBeEval LIKE '%[^0-9]%'
SET @bitReturn = 0
ELSE
SET @bitReturn = 1
RETURN @bitReturn
END
PS- I could really use a killer transact-sql book. Any recommendations?

Thanks in advance,
Greg Norris - CoLinear Systems

Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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AlwaysLearning SSChasing Mays Points: 627 More actions · Answer 1

If you search for LIKE in books online you'll see a description of each piece of this.

In a nutshell it is saying if any characters in the string are not 0 - 9 then

return false or 0.

The way it breaks down is this.

% = Multi-character wildcard

^ = Not operator

[0-9] = range of numbers 0 through 9

Hope this helps

Greg Norris-214114 SSC Eights! Points: 888 More actions · Answer 2

Hey Mark,

Yes, that helps a lot! I really appreciate the info. Is there anything I need to click on to give you a vote, or to otherwise show gratitude? I don't see anything here, but some forums have such a thing.

Thanks again,

Greg

AlwaysLearning SSChasing Mays Points: 627 More actions · Answer 3

Greg,

Sending a short reply as you did is a great way to show appreciation.

Glad I could help.

Mark

Greg Norris-214114 SSC Eights! Points: 888 More actions · Answer 4

I tried it your way, and all I get is the following error:

Could not find stored procedure 'UPDATE SYSOENT

SET CREDIT_CARD_# = dbo.udf_smearcc(@column),

WHERE order_no < 100'.

I did it like you said. Here's my code:

DECLARE @table CHAR(8), @column VARCHAR(16)

SET @table = @tableName

SET @column = @colName

SET @sqlString = N'UPDATE ' + @table + '

SET ' + @column + ' = dbo.udf_smearcc(@column),

WHERE order_no < 100' --For testing

EXEC @sqlString

Any suggestions?

hoo-t SSChampion Points: 12713 More actions · Answer 5

Greg,

I'm confused. This post doesn't seem to correspond to the rest of the thread. In any event, try putting parens around @sqlString...

EXEC (@sqlString)

Steve