I recently reached out to this community for assistance on how to remove a specific character from the very beginning of a string and at the end of a string. In my case, the character I needed removed was an ampersand. Here is the code I used that resolved my issue:
select substr((rpu.userrole), 2, length(rpu.userrole) - 2) AS UserRole
However, now I am left with strings like this after the very first and last ampersand have been removed:
BachelorLvlProvider&ShortTermAccess&WrkflwBachelorLvl
As you can see, there are anywhere between zero and several ampersands separating these role positions. Cache seems to have a lot of functions to concatenate strings, but am not having any luck finding functions to replace characters in a string. There is a "$replace" function but I believe it only works in ObjectScript.
Can anyone assist me in replacing all ampersands regardless of how many there are in each string with the literal ', ' ? I need to separate these with a single comma and one space. I included the tick marks as that are what I use in the code for my strings.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
You can use REPLACE in SQL as well (Caché/Ensemble and IRIS).
SELECT REPLACE('BachelorLvlProvider&ShortTermAccess&WrkflwBachelorLvl','&',',') as UserRole
will give
BachelorLvlProvider,ShortTermAccess,WrkflwBachelorLvl
My test below works perfectly well :
SELECT REPLACE(substr(('&BachelorLvlProvider&ShortTermAccess&WrkflwBachelorLvl&'), 2, length('&BachelorLvlProvider&ShortTermAccess&WrkflwBachelorLvl&') - 2),'&',',') as UserRole
The IBM i implementation of regex uses apostrophes (instead of e.g. slashes) to delimit a regex string, i.e.:
... where REGEXP_SUBSTR(MYFIELD,'myregex_expression')
If I try to use an apostrophe inside a [group] within the expression, it always errors - presumably thinking I am giving a closing quote. I have tried:
- escaping it: \'
- doubling it: '' (and tripling)
No joy. I cannot find anything relevant in the IBM SQL manual or by google search.
I really need this to, for instance, allow names like O'Leary.
Thanks to Wiktor Stribizew for the answer in his comment.
There are a couple of "gotchas" for anyone who might land on this question with the same problem. The first is that you have to give the (presumably Unicode) hex value rather than the EBCDIC value that you would use, e.g. in ordinary interactive SQL on the IBM i. So in this case it really is \x27 and not \x7D for an apostrophe. Presumably this is because the REGEXP_ ... functions are working through Unicode even for EBCDIC data.
The second thing is that it would seem that the hex value cannot be the last one in the set. So this works:
^[A-Z0-9_\+\x27-]+ ... etc.
But this doesn't
^[A-Z0-9_\+-\x27]+ ... etc.
I don't know how to highlight text within a code sample, so I draw your attention to the fact that the hyphen is last in the first sample and second-to-last in the second sample.
If anyone knows why it has to not be last, I'd be interested to know. [edit: see Wiktor's answer for the reason]
btw, using double quotes as the string delimiter with an apostrophe in the set didn't work in this context.
A single quote can be defined with the \x27 notation:
^[A-Z0-9_+\x27-]+
^^^^
Note that when you use a hyphen in the character class/bracket expression, when used in between some chars it forms a range between those symbols. When you used ^[A-Z0-9_\+-\x27]+ you defined a range between + and ', which is an invalid range as the + comes after ' in the Unicode table.
I have a column in Openrefine, which I would like to add a character string in each of its rows, based on the position in the string.
For example:
I have an 8th character number string: 85285296 and would like to add "-" at the fourth place: "8528-5296".
Anyone can help me find the specific function in OpenRefine?
Thanks
Tzipy
The simplest approach is to just use the expression language's built-in string indexing and concatenation:
value[0,4]+'-'+value[4,8]
or more generally, if you don't know that your value is exactly 8 characters long:
value[0,4]+'-'+value[4,999]
Possible solution (not sure if it's the most straightforward):
value.replace(/(\d{4})(.+)/, "$1-$2")
This means : if $1 represents the content of the first parenthesis/group in the regular expression before and $2 the content of the second one, replaces each value in the column with $1-$2.
Some other options:
value.splitByLengths(4,4).join("-")
value.match(/(\d{4})(\d{4})/).join("-")
value.substring(0,4)+"-"+value.substring(4,8)
I think 'splitByLengths' is the neatest, but I might use 'match' instead because it fails with an error if your starting string isn't 8 digits - which means you don't accidentally process data that doesn't conform to your assumption of what data is in the column - but you could use a facet/filter to check this with any of the others
This is from a Oracle SQL query. It has these weird skinny rectangle shapes in the database in places where apostrophes should be. (I wish we would could paste screen shots in here)
It looks like this when I copy and paste the results.
spouse�s
is there a way to write a SQL SELECT statement that searches for this character in the field and replaces it with an apostrophe in the results?
Edit: I need to change only the results in a SELECT statement for reporting purposes, I can't change the Database.
I ran this
select dump('�') from dual;
which returned
Typ=96 Len=3: 239,191,189
This seems to work so far
select translate('What is your spouse�s first name?', '�', '''') from dual;
but this doesn't work
select translate(Fieldname, '�', '''') from TableName
Select FN from TN
What is your spouse�s first name?
SELECT DUMP(FN, 1016) from TN
Typ=1 Len=33 CharacterSet=US7ASCII: 57,68,61,74,20,69,73,20,79,6f,75,72,20,73,70,6f,75,73,65,92,73,20,66,69,72,73,74,20,6e,61,6d,65,3f
EDIT:
So I have established that is the backquote character. I can't get the DB updated so I'm trying this code
SELECT REGEX_REPLACE(FN,"\0092","\0027") FROM TN
and I"m getting ORA-00904:"Regex_Replace":invalid identifier
This seems a problem with your charset configuracion. Check your NLS_LANG and others NLS_xxx enviroment/regedit values. You have to check the oracle server, your client and the client of the inserter of that data.
Try to DUMP the value. you can do it with a select as simple as:
SELECT DUMP(the_column)
FROM xxx
WHERE xxx
UPDATE: I think that before try to replace, look for the root of the problem. If this happens because a charset trouble you can get big problems with bad data.
UPDATE 2: Answering the comments. The problem may be is not on the database server side, may be is in the client side. The problem (if this is the problem) can be a translation on server to/from client comunication. It's for a server-client bad configuracion-coordination. For instance if the server has defined UTF8 charset and your client uses US7ASCII, then all acutes will appear as ?.
Another approach can be that if the server has defined UTF8 charset and your client also UTF8 but the application is not able to show UTF8 chars, then the problem is in the application side.
UPDATE 3: On your examples:
select translate('What. It works because the � is exactly the same char: You have pasted on both sides.
select translate(Fieldname. It does not work because the � is not stored on database, it's the char that the client receives may be because some translation occurs from the data table until it's showed to you.
Next step: Look in DUMP syntax and try to extract the codes for the mysterious char (from the table not pasting �!).
I would say there's a good chance the character is a single-tick "smart quote" (I hate the name). The smart quotes are characters 91-94 (using a Windows encoding), or Unicode U+2018, U+2019, U+201C, and U+201D.
I'm going to propose a front-end application-based, client-side approach to the problem:
I suspect that this problem has more to do with a mismatch between the font you are trying to display the word spouse�s with, and the character �. That icon appears when you are trying to display a character in a Unicode font that doesn't have the glyph for the character's code.
The Oracle database will dutifully return whatever characters were INSERTed into its' column. It's more up to you, and your application, to interpret what it will look like given the font you are trying to display your data with in your application, so I suggest investigating as to what this mysterious � character is that is replacing your apostrophes. Start by using FerranB's recommended DUMP().
Try running the following query to get the character code:
SELECT DUMP(<column with weird character>, 1016)
FROM <your table>
WHERE <column with weird character> like '%spouse%';
If that doesn't grab your actual text from the database, you'll need to modify the WHERE clause to actually grab the offending column.
Once you've found the code for the character, you could just replace the character by using the regex_replace() built-in function by determining the raw hex code of the character and then supplying the ASCII / C0 Controls and Basic Latin character 0x0027 ('), using code similar to this:
UPDATE <table>
set <column with offending character>
= REGEX_REPLACE(<column with offending character>,
"<character code of �>",
"'")
WHERE regex_like(<column with offending character>,"<character code of �>");
If you aren't familiar with Unicode and different ways of character encoding, I recommend reading Joel's article The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). I wasn't until I read that article.
EDIT: If your'e seeing 0x92, there's likely a charset mismatch here:
0x92 in CP-1252 (default Windows code page) is a backquote character, which looks kinda like an apostrophe. This code isn't a valid ASCII character, and it isn't valid in IS0-8859-1 either. So probably either the database is in CP-1252 encoding (don't find that likely), or a database connection which spoke CP-1252 inserted it, or somehow the apostrophe got converted to 0x92. The database is returning values that are valid in CP-1252 (or some other charset where 0x92 is valid), but your db client connection isn't expecting CP-1252. Hence, the wierd question mark.
And FerranB is likely right. I would talk with your DBA or some other admin about this to get the issue straightened out. If you can't, I would try either doing the update above (seems like you can't), or doing this:
INSERT (<normal table columns>,...,<column with offending character>) INTO <table>
SELECT <all normal columns>, REGEX_REPLACE(<column with offending character>,
"\0092",
"\0027") -- for ASCII/ISO-8859-1 apostrophe
FROM <table>
WHERE regex_like(<column with offending character>,"\0092");
DELETE FROM <table> WHERE regex_like(<column with offending character>,"\0092");
Before you do this you need to understand what actually happened. It looks to me that someone inserted non-ascii strings in the database. For example Unicode or UTF-8. Before you fix this, be very sure that this is actually a bug. The apostrophe comes in many forms, not just the "'".
TRANSLATE() is a useful function for replacing or eliminating known single character codes.
I need to pad numbers with leading zeros (total 8 digits) for display. I'm using oracle.
select to_char(1011,'00000000') OPE_NO from dual;
select length(to_char(1011,'00000000')) OPE_NO from dual;
Instead of '00001011' I get ' 00001011'.
Why do I get an extra leading blank space? What is the correct number formatting string to accomplish this?
P.S. I realise I can just use trim(), but I want to understand number formatting better.
#Eddie: I already read the documentation. And yet I still don't understand how to get rid of the leading whitespace.
#David: So does that mean there's no way but to use trim()?
Use FM (Fill Mode), e.g.
select to_char(1011,'FM00000000') OPE_NO from dual;
From that same documentation mentioned by EddieAwad:
Negative return values automatically
contain a leading negative sign and
positive values automatically contain
a leading space unless the format
model contains the MI, S, or PR format
element.
EDIT: The right way is to use the FM modifier, as answered by Steve Bosman. Read the section about Format Model Modifiers for more info.