>Hi Charles,
>
>>I know how to use CONTAINS when full text indexing is on but is there a way to find all records containing '[ISO]' in a varchar(1500) column without it?
>
>You can use LIKE operator
>

>VarcharColumn LIKE '[[]ISO]' 
>-- or
>VarcharColumn LIKE '\[ISO]' ESCAPE '\'
>
>

>
>>
>>And what would be the syntax equiv to STRTRAN(mycolumn,'[ISO]','') ?
>
>and REPLACE() function here
>

>REPLACE(yourcolumn,'[ISO]','')
>

Minor correction in the above:

VarcharColumn LIKE '%[[]ISO]%' 

-- OR

or
VarcharColumn LIKE '%\[ISO]%' ESCAPE '\'

See also CHARINDEX and PATINDEX functions, though in WHERE clause you want to use LIKE. Although if you want to search for an expression anywhere in the string, LIKE '%' + pattern + '%' is not optimized.