Find all special characters in a column in SQL Server 2008

select count(*) from dbo.tablename where address_line_1 LIKE '%[\'']%' {eSCAPE'\'}

The following transact SQL script works for all languages (international). The solution is not to check for alphanumeric but to check for not containing special characters.

DECLARE @teststring nvarchar(max)
SET @teststring = 'Test''Me'
SELECT 'IS ALPHANUMERIC: ' + @teststring
WHERE @teststring NOT LIKE '%[-!#%&+,./:;<=>@`{|}~"()*\\\_\^\?\[\]\'']%' {ESCAPE '\'}

Select * from TableName Where ColumnName LIKE '%[^A-Za-z0-9, ]%'

This will give you all the row which contains any special character.

Negatives are your friend here:

SELECT Col1
FROM TABLE
WHERE Col1 like '%[^a-Z0-9]%'

Which says that you want any rows where Col1 consists of any number of characters, then one character not in the set a-Z0-9, and then any number of characters.

If you have a case sensitive collation, it's important that you use a range that includes both upper and lower case A, a, Z and z, which is what I've given (originally I had it the wrong way around. a comes before A. Z comes after z)

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Or, to put it another way, you could have written your original WHERE as:

Col1 LIKE '%[!@#$%]%'

But, as you observed, you'd need to know all of the characters to include in the [].