SQL Server 2000 - How to remove the hidden characters in the column?

Question

I'm trying to remove a hidden characters from a varchar column, these hidden characters (ie period, space) was taken from a scanned bar code and it is not visible in the result set once query was executed. I have tried to use below script but it failed to remove the hidden characters(see attached screenshot for reference.)

Any help is highly appreciated.

SELECT Replace(Replace(LTrim(RTrim(mycolumn)), '.', ''), ' ', '')
FROM MyTable 
WHERE serialno = '123456789'

Answer 1

One thing that has worked for me is to select the column with the special characters, then paste the data into notepad++ then turn on View>Show Symbol>Show All Characters. Then I could copy the special characters from Notepad++ into the second argument of the REPLACE() function in SQL.