Re: Text searching within multiple rows

"John" <junk_at_junk.com> wrote in message news:<asmqr7$hjr$1_at_perki.connect.com.au>...
> Hi,
>
> I have a database that contains units of code, broken into chunks of text
> across multiple rows with a counter to stitch them back together.
>
> I have a requirement to perform regular expression searches on the text. I
> would prefer to use Oracle's built in regular expression matching wildcards,
> but would like them to extend across the chunk boundaries.
>
> So, given a table containing
>
> PROG_ID CHUNK_NUM CHUNK
> -------------------------------------------------
>
> and a search within the CHUNKs for a specific PROG_ID, is there any SQL that
> could perform this, or should I look to PL/SQL or perhaps a view that does
> the stitching of the blocks?
>
> thanks,
>
> John.

John, I am not familar with Oracle built-in text searching mechanisms (Intermedia), but if I had to search multiple chunks and wanted the search to be able to find strings that might span the chunks I would look into reading the chunks into a LOB. Then I could search the LOB using the dbms_lob package functions to perform instr, substr etc....

Just an idea.
-- Mark D Powell -- Received on Thu Dec 05 2002 - 09:12:22 CST