SQL question

Greetings,

Running Oracle 10.2.0.3.0 on RHEL4, 64-bit.

Table:

foo VARCHAR2(300)
bar CHAR(1)
baz CHAR(1)

Data:

somelongishstring,A,B
shorterstring,A,C
shorter,A,D

Query:

select foo,bar,baz
from mytable
/

Output:

somelongishstring                                                                  ,A,B
shorterstring                                                                      ,A,C
shorter                                                                            ,A,D

Desired:

somelongishstring,A,B
shorterstring,A,C
shorter,A,D

SQL> select substr(foo,0,instr(foo,' ',0,1)),bar,baz from mytable;

Does not work, because there's no space in the data, INSTR(FOO,' ') returns zero and so SUBSTR(foo,0,0) returns an empty string. > Is there any way to achieve the desired result in vanilla SQL*Plus short of the following (which looks like line noise), or resorting to PL/SQL or some other language (Perl, Java, ...)?

select foo||','||bar||','||baz
from mytable
/

Thanks.
Bill Wagman
Univ. of California at Davis
IET Campus Data Center
wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu
(530) 754-6208

†Ûiÿü0ÁúÞzX¬¶Ê+ƒün– {ú+iÉ^ Received on Mon Oct 13 2008 - 18:34:16 CDT