In MS SQL Server how can I do a character replace? Example: In a specific field, how do I replace all spaces with an underscore character, in every record containing a space? More information: I needed to replace all spaces in a name field with underscore characters, so a different program would recognize the entire field as a single entry. I couldn't think of a quick way so I had to replace about 400 spaces by hand. Not very fun.

T-SQL has a very useful function called REPLACE. What this does is look for the occurances of a specified string in your target and replace it with another one. So we can use this format:

<result> = replace(<source>, ' ', '_')

More specific to your case, you need to

UPDATE <table> SET name = REPLACE(LTRIM(RTRIM(name)), ' ', '_')

Note that I've added the TRIMs to ensure there's no leading and trailing spaces, as I don't suppose you would need to convert those to underscores.

Good Luck!

Owen

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