How to find rows with only special characters on a field using MySQL?

Question

Here's the deal, i must find the rows, on which a determined field contains only special characters, I've been trying using regex, with no success.

Can someone help me please?

Answer 1

You can use

SELECT * FROM table WHERE col REGEXP '^[^[:alnum:][:space:]_]+$'

See the regex demo .

The regex pattern breakdown:

• ^ - start of string
• [^ - start of the negated character class that matches any character other than defined in this class
  • [:alnum:] - letters and digits
  • [:space:] - whitespace
  • _ - underscore
• ] - end of the negated character class
• + - the characters matched by the negated character class must be 1 or more occurrences
• $ - end of string