Using Regex on a variable in a SQL function - sql

Question

I'm working on a SQL developer function that standardizes street suffixes in a table of addresses. Originally I had a series of replace statements with regex like this:
select replace (ADDRESS, '(^|\s)(AVENUE)($|\s)', ' AVE ') into ADDRESS from dual;
But to try to decrease the length of the function, I changed it to a cursor which looks like this:
DECLARE
CURSOR CHANGE_SUFFIX
IS
SELECT *
FROM SUFFIX_LIST;
BEGIN
FOR SUFFIX_LIST
IN CHANGE_SUFFIX
LOOP
select regexp_replace (ADDRESS, SUFFIX_LIST.ORIG_SUFFIX, SUFFIX_LIST.CHANGED_SUFFIX) into ADDRESS from dual;
END LOOP;
END;
Where I have a table (SUFFIX_LIST) with a column of what should be changed (ORIG_SUFFIX) and what it's supposed to change into (CHANGED_SUFFIX).
The issue I'm having is that I can't find a way to apply the original regex to the replace statement in the cursor. I tried including it like
select regexp_replace (ADDRESS, (^|\s)SUFFIX_LIST.ORIG_SUFFIX($|\s), SUFFIX_LIST.CHANGED_SUFFIX) into ADDRESS from dual
But that gives an error (missing expression) and putting it in single quotes treats it like a string. Any help appreciated, please lmk if there are any questions.

Answer 1

You need the anchors to be strings, but then you need to concatenate them with the table values:
select regexp_replace (ADDRESS, '(^|\s)' || SUFFIX_LIST.ORIG_SUFFIX || '($|\s)',
SUFFIX_LIST.CHANGED_SUFFIX) into ADDRESS from dual;
Or you could do that concatenation in the cursor query. As ADDRESS is a PL/SQL variable you also don't need to select from dual to modify that; you can just assign it:
address := regexp_replace (ADDRESS, '(^|\s)' || SUFFIX_LIST.ORIG_SUFFIX || '($|\s)',
SUFFIX_LIST.CHANGED_SUFFIX);
You can do the same concatenation to add the spaces back around the CHANGED_SUFFIX values if the table values don't have those. (Presumably you trim them off at the end...)