Re: Working with BLOBS

In article <1068497208.914442_at_yasure>, damorgan_at_x.washington.edu says...
> Jeremy wrote:
>
> >Hi - PL/SQL Oracle 8i (8.1.7)
> >
> >We have a document stored in a BLOB. We know this is an RTF (rich text
> >format) and it contains 'placeholders' (e.g. [last_name] which we then
> >wish to substitute with the person's name).
> >
> >So we read the BLOB into a PL/SQL block - what is the most
> >efficient/easiest way of performing our string replacements?
> >
> >If it were in a varchar2, we could simply say
> >
> > l_doc := replace(l_doc,'[last_name]',l_last_name);
> >
> >Is there an equivalent with BLOBS? Or do I need to read it in chunks
> >into a varchar2, process it and then reassemble it as a new BLOB?
> >
> >Thanks for any pointeres here....
> >
> >
> >
> BLOB or CLOB? Because I don't think you'll find doing string
> replacements in BLOBs
> a particularly enjoyable activity.
>
> Either way ... the functionality is contained in the DBMS_LOB built-in
> package.
> Documentation is available at http://tahiti.oracle.com.
>

Thanks - it is character data in this case - RTF is all printable characters. It is stored in a generic documents table which may contain binary data as well, hence the BLOB data type chosen for storage.

So... as it is very much CLOB....does this make it easier?

-- 

jeremy