Re: doing data conversions

On Thu, 10 May 2001 15:14:16 +0200, "Patrick Sinke" <patrick.sinke_at_capgemini.nl> wrote:
>It's gonna be a large piece of code, but you can do it with Decode!
>
>select decode( 'AL', 'alabama'
> , 'CA', 'California'
> , ...... -- and so on
> , 'Unknown' -- value if none of the above match
> )
>from table

If you have too many choices in DECODE, it errors out. A way around this is to make the final default value NULL and use NVL to call a second DECODE if the first one didn't have any matches. (And a third if you really have a lot of values.)

Not that I have ever done this! :-)

John

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