I have varchar field in the database that contains text. I need to replace every occurrence of a any 2 letter + 8 digits string to a link, such as VA12345678 will return /cs/page.asp?id=VA12345678
I have a regex that replaces the string but how can I replace it with a string where part of it is the string itself?
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE ('test PI20099742', '[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{8}$', 'link to replace with')
FROM dual;
I can have more than one of these strings in one varchar field and ideally I would like to have them replaced in one statement instead of a loop.
As mathguy had said, you can use backreferences for your use case. Try a query like this one.
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE ('test PI20099742', '([A-Z]{2}[0-9]{8})', '/cs/page.asp?id=\1')
FROM DUAL;
For such cases, you may want to keep the "text to add" somewhere at the top of the query, so that if you ever need to change it, you don't have to hunt for it.
You can do that with a with clause, as shown below. I also put some input data for testing in the with clause, but you should remove that and reference your actual table in your query.
I used the [:alpha:] character class, to match all letters - upper or lower case, accented or not, etc. [A-Z] will work until it doesn't.
with
text_to_add (link) as (
select '/cs/page.asp?id=' from dual
)
, sample_strings (str) as (
select 'test VA12398403 and PI83048203 to PT3904' from dual
)
select regexp_replace(str, '([[:alpha:]]{2}\d{8})', link || '\1')
as str_with_links
from sample_strings cross join text_to_add
;
STR_WITH_LINKS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
test /cs/page.asp?id=VA12398403 and /cs/page.asp?id=PI83048203 to PT3904
I need to replace multiple words such as (dog|cat|bird) with nothing in a string where there may be multiple consecutive occurrences of a word. The actual code is to remove salutations and suffixes from a name. Unfortunately the garbage data I get sometimes contains "SNERD JR JR."
I was able to create a regular expression pattern that accomplishes my goal but only for the first occurrence. I implemented a stupid hack to get rid of the second occurrence, but I believe there has to be a better way. I just can't figure it out.
Here is my "hacked" code;
FUNCTION REMOVE_SALUTATIONS(IN_STRING VARCHAR2) RETURN VARCHAR2 DETERMINISTIC
AS
REGEX_SALUTATIONS VARCHAR2(4000) := '(^|\s)(MR|MS|MISS|MRS|DR|MD|M D|SR|SIR|PHD|P H D|II|III|IV|JR)(\.?)(\s|$)';
BEGIN
RETURN TRIM(REGEXP_REPLACE(REGEXP_REPLACE(IN_STRING,REGEX_SALUTATIONS,' '),REGEX_SALUTATIONS,''));
END REMOVE_SALUTATIONS;
I was actually proud that I was able to get this far, as regular expression are not very regular to me. All help is appreciated.
EDIT:
The default for regexp_replace based on my understanding is to do a global replace. But on the outside chance my DB is configured different I did try;
select REGEXP_REPLACE('SNERD JR JR','(^|\s)(MR|MS|MISS|MRS|DR|MD|M D|SR|SIR|PHD|P H D|II|III|IV|JR)(\.?)(\s|$)',' ',1,0) from dual;
and the results are;
SNERD JR
Use occurrence parameter of REGEXP_REPLACE function. The docs says:
occurrence is a nonnegative integer indicating the occurrence of the replace operation:
If you specify 0, then Oracle replaces all occurrences of the match.
If you specify a positive integer n, then Oracle replaces the nth occurrenc
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28286/functions137.htm#SQLRF06302
It should look like:
...
REGEXP_REPLACE(IN_STRING,REGEX_SALUTATIONS,' ', 1,0 )
...
please, I have in Oracle table this texts (as 2 records)
"Sample text with replace parameter %1%"
"You reached 90% of your limit"
I need replace %1% with specific text from input parameter in Oracle Function. In fact, I can have more than just one replace parameters. I have also record with "Replace this %12% with real value"
This functionality I have programmed:
IF poc > 0 THEN
FOR i in 1 .. poc LOOP
p := get_param(mString => mbody);
mbody := replace(mbody,
'%' || p || '%', parameters(to_number(p, '99')));
END LOOP;
END IF;
But in this case I have problem with text number 2. This functionality trying replace "90%" also and I then I get this error:
ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: NULL index table key value
It's a possible to avoid try replace "90%"? Many thanks for advice.
Best regards
PS: Oracle version: 10g (OCI Version: 10.2)
Regular expressions can work here. Try the following and build them into your script.
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE( 'Sample text with replace parameter %1%',
'\%[0-9]+\%',
'db_size' )
FROM DUAL
and
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE( 'Sample text with replace parameter 1%',
'\%[0-9]+\%',
'db_size' )
FROM DUAL
The pattern is pretty simple; look for patterns where a '%' is followed by 1 or more numbers followed by a '%'.
The only issue here will be if you have more than one replacement to make in each string and each replacement is different. In that case you will need to loop round the string each time replacing the next parameter. To do this add the position and occurrence parameters to REGEXP_REPLACE after the replacement string, e.g.
REGEXP_REPLACE( 'Sample text with replace parameter %88888888888%','\%[0-9]+\%','db_size',0,1 )
You are getting the error because at parameters(to_number(p, '99')). Can you please check the value of p?
Also, if the p=90 then then REPLACE will not try to replace "90%". It will replace "%90%". How have you been sure that it's trying to replace "90%"?
I've reviewed this question and I'm wondering my output seems to be a little skewed.
From my understanding the REGEXP_REPLACE method, takes a string that you want to replace content with, followed by a pattern to match, then anything that does not match that pattern is replaced with the substitution param.
I've written the following function to extract distance from a text field, in which a spatial query will be performed on the result.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION extract_distance
(
p_search_string VARCHAR2
)
RETURN VARCHAR2
IS
l_distance VARCHAR2(25);
BEGIN
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(UPPER(p_search_string), '(([0-9]{0,4}) ?MILES)', '')
INTO l_distance FROM SYS.DUAL;
RETURN l_distance;
END extract_distance;
When I run this in a block to test:
DECLARE
l_output VARCHAR2(25);
BEGIN
l_output := extract_distance('Stores selling COD4 in 400 Miles');
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(l_output);
END;
I'd expect the output 400 miles but in-fact I get Stores selling COD4 in. Where have I gone wrong?
"REGEXP_REPLACE extends the functionality of the REPLACE function by letting you search a string for a regular expression pattern. By default, the function returns source_char with every occurrence of the regular expression pattern replaced with replace_string." from Oracle docu
You could use, e.g.,
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE('Stores selling COD4 in 400 Miles', '^.*?(\d+ ?MILES).*$', '\1', 1, 0, 'i') FROM DUAL;
or alternatively
SELECT REGEXP_SUBSTR('Stores selling COD4 in 400 Miles', '(\d+ ?MILES)', 1, 1, 'i') FROM DUAL;
You'll want to use, regexp_substr which returns a substring that matches the regular expression.
REGEX_SUBSTR
We are currently migrating one of our oracle databases to UTF8 and we have found a few records that are near the 4000 byte varchar limit.
When we try and migrate these record they fail as they contain characters that become multibyte UF8 characters.
What I want to do within PL/SQL is locate these characters to see what they are and then either change them or remove them.
I would like to do :
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(COLUMN,'[^[:ascii:]],'')
but Oracle does not implement the [:ascii:] character class.
Is there a simple way doing what I want to do?
I think this will do the trick:
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(COLUMN, '[^[:print:]]', '')
If you use the ASCIISTR function to convert the Unicode to literals of the form \nnnn, you can then use REGEXP_REPLACE to strip those literals out, like so...
UPDATE table SET field = REGEXP_REPLACE(ASCIISTR(field), '\\[[:xdigit:]]{4}', '')
...where field and table are your field and table names respectively.
I wouldn't recommend it for production code, but it makes sense and seems to work:
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(COLUMN,'[^' || CHR(1) || '-' || CHR(127) || '],'')
The select may look like the following sample:
select nvalue from table
where length(asciistr(nvalue))!=length(nvalue)
order by nvalue;
In a single-byte ASCII-compatible encoding (e.g. Latin-1), ASCII characters are simply bytes in the range 0 to 127. So you can use something like [\x80-\xFF] to detect non-ASCII characters.
There's probably a more direct way using regular expressions. With luck, somebody else will provide it. But here's what I'd do without needing to go to the manuals.
Create a PLSQL function to receive your input string and return a varchar2.
In the PLSQL function, do an asciistr() of your input. The PLSQL is because that may return a string longer than 4000 and you have 32K available for varchar2 in PLSQL.
That function converts the non-ASCII characters to \xxxx notation. So you can use regular expressions to find and remove those. Then return the result.
The following also works:
select dump(a,1016), a from (
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE (
CONVERT (
'3735844533120%$03 ',
'US7ASCII',
'WE8ISO8859P1'),
'[^!#/\.,;:<>#$%&()_=[:alnum:][:blank:]]') a
FROM DUAL);
I had a similar issue and blogged about it here.
I started with the regular expression for alpha numerics, then added in the few basic punctuation characters I liked:
select dump(a,1016), a, b
from
(select regexp_replace(COLUMN,'[[:alnum:]/''%()> -.:=;[]','') a,
COLUMN b
from TABLE)
where a is not null
order by a;
I used dump with the 1016 variant to give out the hex characters I wanted to replace which I could then user in a utl_raw.cast_to_varchar2.
I found the answer here:
http://www.squaredba.com/remove-non-ascii-characters-from-a-column-255.html
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION O1DW.RECTIFY_NON_ASCII(INPUT_STR IN VARCHAR2)
RETURN VARCHAR2
IS
str VARCHAR2(2000);
act number :=0;
cnt number :=0;
askey number :=0;
OUTPUT_STR VARCHAR2(2000);
begin
str:=’^'||TO_CHAR(INPUT_STR)||’^';
cnt:=length(str);
for i in 1 .. cnt loop
askey :=0;
select ascii(substr(str,i,1)) into askey
from dual;
if askey < 32 or askey >=127 then
str :=’^'||REPLACE(str, CHR(askey),”);
end if;
end loop;
OUTPUT_STR := trim(ltrim(rtrim(trim(str),’^'),’^'));
RETURN (OUTPUT_STR);
end;
/
Then run this to update your data
update o1dw.rate_ipselect_p_20110505
set NCANI = RECTIFY_NON_ASCII(NCANI);
Try the following:
-- To detect
select 1 from dual
where regexp_like(trim('xx test text æ¸¬è© ¦ “xmx” number²'),'['||chr(128)||'-'||chr(255)||']','in')
-- To strip out
select regexp_replace(trim('xx test text æ¸¬è© ¦ “xmxmx” number²'),'['||chr(128)||'-'||chr(255)||']','',1,0,'in')
from dual
You can try something like following to search for the column containing non-ascii character :
select * from your_table where your_col <> asciistr(your_col);
I had similar requirement (to avoid this ugly ORA-31061: XDB error: special char to escaped char conversion failed. ), but had to keep the line breaks.
I tried this from an excellent comment
'[^ -~|[:space:]]'
but got this ORA-12728: invalid range in regular expression .
but it lead me to my solution:
select t.*, regexp_replace(deta, '[^[:print:]|[:space:]]', '#') from
(select '- <- strangest thing here, and I want to keep line break after
-' deta from dual ) t
displays (in my TOAD tool) as
replace all that ^ => is not in the sets (of printing [:print:] or space |[:space:] chars)
Thanks, this worked for my purposes. BTW there is a missing single-quote in the example, above.
REGEXP_REPLACE (COLUMN,'[^' || CHR (32) || '-' || CHR (127) || ']', ' '))
I used it in a word-wrap function. Occasionally there was an embedded NewLine/ NL / CHR(10) / 0A in the incoming text that was messing things up.
Answer given by Francisco Hayoz is the best. Don't use pl/sql functions if sql can do it for you.
Here is the simple test in Oracle 11.2.03
select s
, regexp_replace(s,'[^'||chr(1)||'-'||chr(127)||']','') "rep ^1-127"
, dump(regexp_replace(s,'['||chr(127)||'-'||chr(225)||']','')) "rep 127-255"
from (
select listagg(c, '') within group (order by c) s
from (select 127+level l,chr(127+level) c from dual connect by level < 129))
And "rep 127-255" is
Typ=1 Len=30: 226,227,228,229,230,231,232,233,234,235,236,237,238,239,240,241,242,243,244,245,246,247,248,249,250,251,252,253,254,255
i.e for some reason this version of Oracle does not replace char(226) and above.
Using '['||chr(127)||'-'||chr(225)||']' gives the desired result.
If you need to replace other characters just add them to the regex above or use nested replace|regexp_replace if the replacement is different then '' (null string).
Please note that whenever you use
regexp_like(column, '[A-Z]')
Oracle's regexp engine will match certain characters from the Latin-1 range as well: this applies to all characters that look similar to ASCII characters like Ä->A, Ö->O, Ü->U, etc., so that [A-Z] is not what you know from other environments like, say, Perl.
Instead of fiddling with regular expressions try changing for the NVARCHAR2 datatype prior to character set upgrade.
Another approach: instead of cutting away part of the fields' contents you might try the SOUNDEX function, provided your database contains European characters (i.e. Latin-1) characters only. Or you just write a function that translates characters from the Latin-1 range into similar looking ASCII characters, like
å => a
ä => a
ö => o
of course only for text blocks exceeding 4000 bytes when transformed to UTF-8.
As noted in this comment, and this comment, you can use a range.
Using Oracle 11, the following works very well:
SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(dummy, '[^ -~|[:space:]]', '?') AS dummy FROM DUAL;
This will replace anything outside that printable range as a question mark.
This will run as-is so you can verify the syntax with your installation.
Replace dummy and dual with your own column/table.
Do this, it will work.
trim(replace(ntwk_slctor_key_txt, chr(0), ''))
I'm a bit late in answering this question, but had the same problem recently (people cut and paste all sorts of stuff into a string and we don't always know what it is).
The following is a simple character whitelist approach:
SELECT est.clients_ref
,TRANSLATE (
est.clients_ref
, 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]:";<>?,./'
|| REPLACE (
TRANSLATE (
est.clients_ref
,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]:";<>?,./'
,'~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'
)
,'~'
)
,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890#$%^&*()_+-={}|[]:";<>?,./'
)
clean_ref
FROM edms_staging_table est