SQL Special Characters on Tables

Question

we are using following SQL to identify several rows which contain only SPECIAL CHARACTERs 'F@C(!!'. But seems it's not capturing some SPECIAL CHARACTER like 'F@C(!!'. Script should capture only special characters. Could you please share the optimized script to use for this scenario case

       when regexp_like(column_name '^[^a-zA-Z]*$') then 'number'
       when regexp_like(column_name, '^[^g-zG-Z]*$') then 'hex'
       else 'string'

end

Answer 1

Try removing the ^ and $ anchors from the regex pattern you are using with regexp_like :

select *
from your_table
where regexp_like(column_name, '[^a-zA-Z]');

The above logic would check for the presence of one or more characters which are not letters. If you instead want to check for non alphanumeric, then use [^A-Za-z0-9] .