title: SQL Server 2008 query to find rows containing non-alphanumeric characters in a column
body: <p>I was actually asked this myself a few weeks ago, whereas I know exactly how to do this with a SP or UDF but I was wondering if there was a quick and easy way of doing this without these methods. I'm assuming that there is and I just can't find it. </p>
  
  <p>A point I need to make is that although we know what characters are allowed (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) we <em>don't want to specify what is not allowed</em> (#@!$ etc...). Also, we want to pull the rows which <strong>have</strong> the illegal characters so that it can be listed to the user to fix (as we have no control over the input process we can't do anything at that point). </p>
  
  <p>I have looked through SO and Google previously, but was unable to find anything that did what I wanted. I have seen many examples which can tell you if it contains alphanumeric characters, or doesn't, but something that is able to pull out an apostrophe in a sentence I have not found in query form.</p>
  
  <p>Please note also that values can be <code>null</code> or <code>''</code> (empty) in this <code>varchar</code> column.</p>