Search for row containing letters only

[GT]

This is my first time posting in this forum...

I am looking for a way to search for rows containing letters only.  I tried the search methods I found on the internet using 

and column_name LIKE ('%[a-z]%') 

but is was actually searching for  %[a-z]%   and not for any individual ;etter.

I got it to work with a large AND / OR statement using each letter but I wanted to see if there was anything about a way to do this smarter.

The second thing i would like to do it to search for rows that contain at least 2 letters.

Anyone know of how to do this?

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE

[Chris Young]

Have you tried

column_name not like '%[^A-Za-z]%'

or for case insensitive searches:

column_name not like '%[^A-Z]%'

[Thomas Kellerer]

This group is about the tool SQL Workbench/J - it's not about general SQL problems.

Having said that:

The SQL LIKE operator does not support regular expressions (it only supports % for any number of characters and _ for exactly one character).

In standard SQL you can use the SIMILAR TO operator which uses a mixture of regular expressions and SQL wildcards (% and _) e.g.:

and column_name SIMILAR TO '%[a-z]%'

Complete support for regular expression is DBMS specific. Postgres for example uses the ~ operator, while Oracle uses regexp_like

Thomas

[Greg Tyber]

Thomas,

The SIMILAR to function worked. 

I had never used that before.

Do you know how I would write it so that each term had more than 3 letters in the criteria?

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