I have a user-entered string which I am using as a search term. I would like to display the results in a table named "SearchResults_"+SearchString. However the string could feasibly contain characters that can't be used for table names - spaces would be the most common and there are plenty of other strange characters in place names.

I would like to strip all special, non-alphanumeric characters from a string.

As far as I can see there aren't any built-in functions that would achieve this.

I can loop through the characters easily enough but comparing each one to a white-list is proving harder than I expected. I could do it with a epic if/else statement but that's just dirty! VB.net has IsLetterOrDigit() which would be nice. PHP has ctype_alnum(). In Python I'd just check it against a white-list string.

Any ideas?