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 UK Postcode verification

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MaverickUK
Yak Posting Veteran

89 Posts

Posted - 2005-02-21 : 06:40:53
Howdy folks

As part of a large project I'm dealing with, I need to verify a table full of UK postcodes.
The verifcation at this stage is relitivly simple and is just a check to make sure that they are a certain length, have numbers/letters in the correct places etc..

I know that I can do this verification with the following regular expression
^[A-Z]{1,2}[0-9]{1,2}[A-Z]{0,1} [0-9][A-Z]{2}$

The problem is, MS SQL Server 2000 doesn't have regular expressions built in. Sadly I don't have SQL Server 2003, so I cannot take advantage of the power of .net!

I've seen various regexp plug-ins for SQL Server 2000, but they all seem to cost. Sadly, with this project, I cannot turn to a paid for solution.



So either
* Has anyone performed a postcode verifcation without regular expression?
* How difficult would it be for myself to write an extended procedure to perform such a task?

Thanks to anyone who can help

spirit1
Cybernetic Yak Master

11752 Posts

Posted - 2005-02-21 : 07:05:29
sql has limited regex capabilities when using LIKE.
ie:

declare @MyTable table (postCode varchar(20))
insert into @MyTable
select '123-456-abc' union all
select '123-def-abc' union all
select '123-a32-rr2'

select *
from @MyTable
where postCode like '[0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9][0-9]-[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]'


Go with the flow & have fun! Else fight the flow
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MaverickUK
Yak Posting Veteran

89 Posts

Posted - 2005-02-21 : 09:02:51
Perfect!

I'll add this to my list of useful SQL tricks I never knew about, thank you
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