Trying to find substring in string on sql server

Question

I have read in many articles and including here on stackoverflow that to find a substring the following should be used:

IF CHARINDEX('mywoRD', @words) > 0
BEGIN
    -- DO SOMETHING
END

I am trying the following but it's not working it always returns wrong:

Say i have a string 'Basketball & Soccer', I am trying to write a script that checks for the ampersand and encodes it to & so it becomes 'Basketball & Soccer' My problem is that there may be another one like this in the database with 'Basketball & Soccer'.

So when I run my script, for the second one it becomes:

'Basketball & Soccer'

I am trying the following to clean it:

DECLARE @cleanparam as varchar(500)   

IF CHARINDEX('&',@myparameter) > 0 
BEGIN 
   -- if & is in the string skip and start with quotes
   SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@myparameter,'"','"')   
END
ELSE
 BEGIN
      -- if not clean &'s and quotes and then continue with others
      SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@myparameter,'&','&')   
      SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@cleanparam,'"','"')   
 END

      SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@cleanparam, '©', '©')
      SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@cleanparam, '«', '«') 
       -- OTHERS HERE

Answer 1

Try this

DECLARE @myparameter as varchar(500) 
set @myparameter = 'Basketball & Soccer & Volleyball'


DECLARE @cleanparam as varchar(500)
SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@myparameter,'&amp;','&') --<----put some trick here :)
SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@cleanparam,'&','&amp;')   
SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@cleanparam,'"','&quot;') 
SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@cleanparam, '©', '&copy;')
SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@cleanparam, '«', '&laquo;') 

SELECT @cleanparam

Answer 2

If there is no way to protect the script from calling several times then you need to enhance it to first convert the encoded sequences back to values and then back to sequences. Like this:

  -- Convert back to symbols
  SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@myparameter,'&','&')   
  SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@cleanparam,'"','"')   
  etc...

  -- Convert symbols to escape sequences
  SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@cleanparam,'&','&')   
  SELECT @cleanparam = REPLACE(@cleanparam,'"','"')   
  etc...