Go to asktom.oracle.com and search for regular expressions. I believe he
has something there.
Jim
"The C. Family" <aurora_at_nr.infi.net> wrote in message
news:frj0mus7e82j5oavd88inqpsv9kr9qt9t2_at_4ax.com...
>
> I've searched all over Google for this, and I'm beginning to believe
> that the answer is "no, it can't be done (without inordinate effort)."
>
> I would like to use something more sophistcated than just % and _
> for pattern matching in SQL queries, and especially in check constraints.
>
> I have an application that expects identifiers that are comprised of
> a alpha character, followed by three digits, then a dash and one to
> 120 characters that can an alpha, a digit, or an underscore (all alphas
> are uppercase, thankfully). In a regular expression, I would match
> on "^[A-Z][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[A-Z0-9_]*$" (I realize some regex's allow
> the three digits in a row to be expressed in a slightly more compact
> fashion, but I left it that way for illustrative purposes- and because I
> couldn't remember exactly how)
>
> To do this with Oracle PL/SQL, I would have to have a series of possibly
> hundreds of and/or clauses with parentheses in abundance. I'd like to
> avoid that, especially in the check constraints for columns that contain
> these identifiers. Regular expression parsers do that sort of thing very
> well. I don't.
>
> Is there something I have been missing in my searches and reading of
> the documentation? FWIW, I have done the research before asking the
> group. I'm hoping we aren't going down the wrong technology road for
> our app. It's the one thing that's keeping us from finalizing our RDMS
> choice on Oracle for this application. Otherwise, it's Sybase, and all
> I can say bout that is "Yikes!!!"
>
> You'd think enough people would have asked for this that the major
> RDMS vendors would just dig in an write a regex function. Sheesh.
Received on Sun Aug 18 2002 - 21:02:46 CDT
