Find non-ASCII characters in varchar columns using SQL Server

Here is a solution for the single column search using PATINDEX.
It also displays the StartPosition, InvalidCharacter and ASCII code.

select line,
  patindex('%[^ !-~]%' COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN,Line) as [Position],
  substring(line,patindex('%[^ !-~]%' COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN,Line),1) as [InvalidCharacter],
  ascii(substring(line,patindex('%[^ !-~]%' COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN,Line),1)) as [ASCIICode]
from  staging.APARMRE1
where patindex('%[^ !-~]%' COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN,Line) >0

Leave a Comment