Split Text into Table Rows with Read-Only Permissions - sql

Question

I am a read-only user for a database with he following problem:
Scenario:
Call center employees for a company submit tickets to me through our database on behalf of our clients. The call center includes alphanumeric lot numbers of an exact length in their message for me to troubleshoot. Depending on how many times a ticket is updated, there could be several messages for one ticket, each of them having zero or more of these alphanumeric lot numbers embedded in the message. I can access all of these messages with Oracle SQL and SQL Tools.
How can I extract just the lot numbers to make a single-column table of all the given lot numbers?
Example Data:
-- Accessing Ticket 1234 --
SELECT *
FROM communications_detail
WHERE ticket_num = 1234;
-- Results --
TICKET_NUM | MESSAGE_NUM | MESSAGE
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1234 | 1 | A customer recently purchased some products with
| | a lot number of vwxyz12345 and wants to know if
| | they have been recalled.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1234 | 2 | Same customer found lots vwxyz23456 and zyxwv12345
| | in their storage as well and would like those checked.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1234 | 3 | These lots have not been recalled. Please inform
| | the client.
So-Far:
I am able to isolate the lot numbers of a constant string with the following code, but it gets put into standard output and not a table format.
DECLARE
msg VARCHAR2(200) := 'Same customer found lots xyz23456 and zyx12345 in their storage as well and would like those checked.';
cnt NUMBER := regexp_count(msg, '[[:alnum:]]{10}');
BEGIN
IF cnt > 0 THEN
FOR i IN 1..cnt LOOP
Dbms_Output.put_line(regexp_substr(msg, '[[:alnum:]]{10}', 1, i));
END LOOP;
END IF;
END;
/
Goals:
Output results into a table that can itself be used as a table in a larger query statement.
Somehow be able to apply this to all of the messages associated with the original ticket.
Update: Changed the example lot numbers from 8 to 10 characters long to avoid confusion with real words in the messages. The real-world scenario has much longer codes and very specific formatting, so a more complex regular expression will be used.
Update 2: Tried using a table variable instead of standard output. It didn't error, but it didn't populate my query tab... This may just be user error...!
DECLARE
TYPE lot_type IS TABLE OF VARCHAR2(10);
lots lot_type := lot_type();
msg VARCHAR2(200) := 'Same customer found lots xyz23456 and zyx12345 in their storage as well and would like those checked.';
cnt NUMBER := regexp_count(msg, '[[:alnum:]]{10}');
BEGIN
IF cnt > 0 THEN
FOR i IN 1..cnt LOOP
lots.extend();
lots(i) := regexp_substr(msg, '[[:alnum:]]{10}', 1, i);
END LOOP;
END IF;
END;
/

Answer 1

This is a regex format which matches the LOT mask you provided: '[a-z]{3}[0-9]{5}' . Using something like this will help you avoid the false positives you mention in your question.
Now here is a read-only, pure SQL solution for you.
with cte as (
select 'Same customer found lots xyz23456 and zyx12345 in their storage as well and would like those checked.' msg
from dual)
select regexp_substr(msg, '[a-z]{3}[0-9]{5}', 1, level) as lotno
from cte
connect by level <= regexp_count(msg, '[a-z]{3}[0-9]{5}')
;
I'm using the WITH clause just to generate the data. The important thing is the the use of the CONNECT BY operator which is part of Oracle's hierarchical data syntax but here generates a table from one row. The pseudo-column LEVEL allows us to traverse the string and pick out the different occurrences of the regex pattern.
Here's the output:
SQL> r
1 with cte as ( select 'Same customer found lots xyz23456 and zyx12345 in their storage as well and would like those checked.' msg from dual)
2 select regexp_substr(msg, '[a-z]{3}[0-9]{5}', 1, level) as lotno
3 from cte
4 connect by level <= regexp_count(msg, '[a-z]{3}[0-9]{5}')
5*
LOTNO
----------
xyz23456
zyx12345
SQL>