Working with Strings

By Steven Feuerstein 

 

Part 3 in a series of articles on understanding and using PL/SQL

Every application needs data. That seems rather obvious, doesn’t it? An application is almost always built on top of database tables. Those tables are full of different kinds of data. And the programs you write—whether they are in PL/SQL or another language—manipulate that data. It is, therefore, extremely important for you to be aware of the different datatypes supported by PL/SQL and how you can work with those datatypes.

Take the Challenge!

Each of my PL/SQL 101 articles offers a quiz to test your knowledge of the information provided in the article. The quiz questions are shown below and also at PL/SQL Challenge (), a Website that offers online quizzes for the PL/SQL language. You can read and answer the quiz here, and then check your answers in the next issue. If, however, you take the quiz at PL/SQL Challenge, you will be entered into a raffle to win your choice of an e-book from O’Reilly Media (). 

Question 1

What will be displayed after executing this block?

 

BEGIN   sys.DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      INSTR ('steven feuerstein'           , 'e'           , -1           , 2));END;

Question 2

True or false: When assigning a literal value to a string, that value may not contain within it any single quotes.

 

Question 3

What will be displayed after executing this block?

 

BEGIN   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      'REPLACE='      || REPLACE ('steven feuerstein'                , 'e'                , NULL));   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      'TRANSLATE='      || TRANSLATE ('steven feuerstein'                  , 'e'                  , NULL));END;

As you might expect, there is an awful lot to learn about datatypes, and not all of that knowledge can fit into a single article. So I will start with one of the most common types of data: strings. Very few database tables and programs do not contain strings—strings such as a company name, address information, descriptive text, and so on. As a result, you quite often need to do the following: 

• Declare string variables and constants

• Manipulate the contents of a string (remove characters, join together multiple strings, and so on)

• Move string data between PL/SQL programs and database tables

This article gives you the information you need to begin working with strings in your PL/SQL programs.

 

What Is a String?

A string, also referred to as character data, is a sequence of selected symbols from a particular set of characters. In other words, the symbols in a string might consist of English letters, such as ”A” or ”B.” They might also consist of Chinese characters, such as 字串.

There are three kinds of strings in PL/SQL:

Fixed-length strings. The string is right-padded with spaces to the length specified in the declaration. (See ”,” to see padding in action.)

Variable-length strings. A maximum length for the string is specified (and it must be no greater than 32,767), but no padding takes place.

Character large objects (CLOBs).CLOBs are variable-length strings that can be up to 128 terabytes.

Strings can be literals or variables. A string literal begins and ends with a single quotation mark: 

'This is a string literal' 

If you need to embed a single quote inside a string literal, you can type in two single quotes right next to one another, as in: 

'This isn''t a date' 

You can also use the “q” character to indicate an alternative terminating character for the literal:

q'[This isn't a date]' 

A string variable is an identifier declared with a string datatype and then assigned a value (which could be a literal or an expression).

Declaring String Variables

To work with strings in your PL/SQL programs, you declare variables to hold the string values. To declare a string variable, you must select from one of the many string datatypes Oracle Database offers, including CHAR, NCHAR, VARCHAR2, NVARCHAR2, CLOB, and NCLOB. The datatypes that are prefixed with an ”N” are “national character set” datatypes, which means they are used to store Unicode character data. (Unicode is a universal encoded character set that can store information in any language using a single character set.)

To declare a variable-length string, you must provide the maximum length of that string. The following code declares a variable, using the VARCHAR2 datatype, that will hold a company name, which cannot (in this declaration) have more than 100 characters: 

DECLARE   l_company_name VARCHAR2(100); 

You must provide the maximum length; if you leave it out, Oracle Database raises a compile error, as shown below: 

SQL> DECLARE  2     l_company_name   VARCHAR2;  3  BEGIN  4     l_company_name := 'Oracle Corporation';  5  END;  6  /l_company_name   VARCHAR2;                    *ERROR at line 2:ORA-06550: line 2, column 21:PLS-00215: String length constraints must be in range (1 .. 32767) 

To declare a fixed-length string, use the CHAR datatype: 

DECLARE   l_yes_or_no CHAR(1) := 'Y'; 

With CHAR (unlike with VARCHAR2) you do not have to specify a maximum length for a fixed-length variable. If you leave off the length constraint, Oracle Database automatically uses a maximum length of 1. In other words, the two declarations below are identical: 

DECLARE   l_yes_or_no1 CHAR(1) := 'Y';   l_yes_or_no2 CHAR := 'Y'; 

If you declare a CHAR variable with a length greater than 1, Oracle Database automatically pads whatever value you assign to that variable with spaces to the maximum length specified.

Finally, to declare a character large object, use the CLOB datatype. You do not specify a maximum length; the length is determined automatically by Oracle Database and is based on the database block size. Here is an example: 

DECLARE   l_lots_of_text CLOB; 

So, how do you determine which datatype to use in your programs? Here are some guidelines: 

• If your string might contain more than 32,767 characters, use the CLOB (or NCLOB) datatype.

• If the value assigned to a string always has a fixed length (such as a U.S. Social Security number, which always has the same format and length, NNN-NN-NNNN), use CHAR (or NCHAR).

• Otherwise (and, therefore, most of the time), use the VARCHAR2 datatype (or NVACHAR2, when working with Unicode data).

Using the CHAR datatype for anything but strings that always have a fixed number of characters can lead to unexpected and undesirable results. Consider the following block, which mixes variable and fixed-length strings:

 

DECLARE  l_variable VARCHAR2 (10) := 'Logic';  l_fixed    CHAR (10) := 'Logic';BEGIN  IF l_variable = l_fixed  THEN   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line ('Equal');  ELSE   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line ('Not Equal');  END IF;END; 

At first glance, you would expect that the word “Equal” would be displayed after execution. That is not the case. Instead, “Not Equal” is displayed, because the value of l_fixed has been padded to a length of 10 with spaces. Consider the padding demonstrated in the following block; you would expect the block to display “Not Equal”:

BEGIN  IF 'Logic' = 'Logic     '  THEN    DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line ('Equal');  ELSE    DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line ('Not Equal');  END IF;END; 

You should, as a result, be very careful about the use of the CHAR datatype, whether as the type of a variable, database column, or parameter.

Once you have declared a variable, you can assign it a value, change its value, and perform operations on the string contained in that variable using string functions and operators.

For the rest of this article, I focus on the VARCHAR2 datatype.

Using Built-in Functions with Strings

Once you assign a string to a variable, you most likely need to analyze the contents of that string, change its value in some way, or combine it with other strings. Oracle Database offers a wide array of built-in functions to help you with all such requirements. Let’s take a look at the most commonly used of these functions.

Concatenate multiple strings. One of the most basic and frequently needed operations on strings is to combine or concatenate them together. PL/SQL offers two ways to do this: 

• The CONCAT built-in function

• The || (concatenation) operator

 The CONCAT function accepts two strings as its arguments and returns those two strings “stuck together.” The concatenation operator also concatenates together two strings, but it is easier to use when combining more than two strings, as you can see in this example: 

DECLARE  l_first  VARCHAR2 (10) := 'Steven';  l_middle VARCHAR2 (5) := 'Eric';  l_last   VARCHAR2 (20)              := 'Feuerstein';BEGIN  /* Use the CONCAT function */  DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (     CONCAT ('Steven', 'Feuerstein'));  /* Use the || operator */  DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      l_first      || ' '      || l_middle      || ' '      || l_last);END;/ 

The output from this block is: 

StevenFeuersteinSteven Eric Feuerstein

 

In my experience, you rarely encounter the CONCAT function. Instead, the || operator is almost universally used by PL/SQL developers.

If either of the strings passed to CONCAT or || is NULL or ‘’ (a zero-length string), both the function and the operator simply return the non-NULL string. If both strings are NULL, NULL is returned.

Change the case of a string. Three built-in functions change the case of characters in a string: 

• UPPER changes all characters to uppercase.

• LOWER changes all characters to lowercase.

• INITCAP changes the first character of each word to uppercase (characters are delimited by a white space or non-alphanumeric character).

 Listing 1 shows some examples that use these case-changing functions.

Code Listing 1: Examples of case-changing functions 

SQL> DECLARE  2     l_company_name   VARCHAR2 (25) := 'oraCLE corporatION';  3  BEGIN  4     DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (UPPER (l_company_name));  5     DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (LOWER (l_company_name));  6     DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (INITCAP (l_company_name));  7  END;  8  /ORACLE CORPORATIONoracle corporationOracle Corporation 

Extract part of a string. One of the most commonly utilized built-in functions for strings is SUBSTR, which is used to extract a substring from a string. When calling SUBSTR, you provide the string, the position at which the desired substring starts, and the number of characters in the substring.

Listing 2 shows some examples that use the SUBSTR function.

Code Listing 2: Examples of SUBSTR function 

DECLARE   l_company_name   VARCHAR2 (6) := 'Oracle';BEGIN   /* Retrieve the first character in the string */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (              SUBSTR (l_company_name, 1, 1));   /* Retrieve the last character in the string */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (              SUBSTR (l_company_name, -1, 1));   /* Retrieve three characters,             starting from the second position. */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (              SUBSTR (l_company_name, 2, 3));   /* Retrieve the remainder of the string,            starting from the second position. */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (              SUBSTR (l_company_name, 2));END;/ 

The output from this block is: 

Oeracracle 

As you can see, with the SUBSTR function you can specify a negative starting position for the substring, in which case Oracle Database counts backward from the end of the string. If you do not provide a third argument—the number of characters in the substring—Oracle Database automatically returns the remainder of the string from the specified position.

Find a string within another string. Use the INSTR function to determine where (and if) a string appears within another string. INSTR accepts as many as four arguments: 

• The string to be searched (required).

• The substring of interest (required).

• The starting position of the search (optional). If the value is negative, count from the end of the string. If no value is provided, Oracle Database starts at the beginning of the string; that is, the starting position is 1.

• The Nth occurrence of the substring (optional). If no value is provided, Oracle Database looks for the first occurrence.

 Listing 3 shows some examples that use the INSTR function.

Code Listing 3: Examples of INSTR function 

BEGIN   /* Find the location of the first "e" */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      INSTR ('steven feuerstein', 'e'));         /* Find the location of the first "e" starting from position 6 */    DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      INSTR ('steven feuerstein'           , 'e'           , 6));              /* Find the location of the first "e" starting from the 6th position from      the end of string and counting to the left. */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      INSTR ('steven feuerstein'           , 'e'           , -6));              /* Find the location of the 3rd "e" starting from the 6th position from      the end of string. */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      INSTR ('steven feuerstein'           , 'e'           , -6           , 3));END;/ 

The output from this block is: 

3911 5 

INSTR is a very flexible and handy utility. It can easily be used to determine whether or not a substring appears at all in a string. Here is a Boolean function that does just that: 

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION is_in_string (  string_in      IN VARCHAR2 ,substring_in   IN VARCHAR2)  RETURN BOOLEANISBEGIN  RETURN INSTR (string_in              , substring_in) > 0;END is_in_string;/ 

Pad a string with spaces (or other characters). I warned earlier about using the CHAR datatype, because Oracle Database pads your string value with spaces to the maximum length specified in the declaration.

However, there are times, primarily when generating reports, when you want to put spaces (or other characters) in front of or after the end of your string. For these situations, Oracle Database offers LPAD and RPAD.

When you call these functions, you specify the length to which you want your string padded and with what character or characters. If you do not specify any pad characters, Oracle Database defaults to padding with spaces.

Listing 4 shows some examples that use these LPAD and RPAD padding functions.

Code Listing 4: Examples of padding functions 

DECLARE   l_first   VARCHAR2 (10) := 'Steven';   l_last    VARCHAR2 (20) := 'Feuerstein';   l_phone   VARCHAR2 (20) := '773-426-9093';BEGIN   /* Indent the subheader by 3 characters */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line ('Header');   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      LPAD ('Sub-header', 13, '.'));   /* Add "123" to the end of the string, until the 20 character is reached.*/   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      RPAD ('abc', 20, '123'));   /* Display headers and then values to fit within the columns. */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (     /*1234567890x12345678901234567890x*/      'First Name Last Name            Phone');   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (         RPAD (l_first, 10)      || ' '      || RPAD (l_last, 20)      || ' '      || l_phone);END;/ 

The output from this block is: 

Header...Sub-headerabc12312312312312312First Name Last Name            PhoneSteven     Feuerstein           773-426-9093 

Replace characters in a string. Oracle Database provides a number of functions that allow you to selectively change one or more characters in a string. You might need, for example, to replace all spaces in a string with the HTML equivalent (“ ”) so the text is displayed properly in a browser. Two functions take care of such needs for you: 

• REPLACE replaces a set or pattern of characters with another set.

• TRANSLATE translates or replaces individual characters.

Listing 5 shows some examples of these two character-replacement built-in functions. Notice that when you are replacing a single character, the effect of REPLACE and TRANSLATE is the same. When replacing multiple characters, REPLACE and TRANSLATE act differently. The call to REPLACE asked that appearances of “abc” be replaced with “123.” If, however, any of the individual characters (a, b, or c) appeared in the string outside of this pattern (“abc”), they would not be replaced.

Code Listing 5: Examples of character replacement functions 

DECLARE   l_name   VARCHAR2 (50) := 'Steven Feuerstein';BEGIN   /* Replace all e's with the number 2. Since you are replacing a single       character, you can use either REPLACE or TRANSLATE. */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      REPLACE (l_name, 'e', '2'));   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      TRANSLATE (l_name, 'e', '2'));   /* Replace all instances of "abc" with "123" */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      REPLACE ('abc-a-b-c-abc'             , 'abc'             , '123'));   /* Replace "a" with "1", "b" with "2", "c" with "3". */    DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      TRANSLATE ('abc-a-b-c-abc'               , 'abc'               , '123'));END;/ 

The output from this block is: 

St2v2n F2u2rst2inSt2v2n F2u2rst2in123-a-b-c-123123-1-2-3-123 

The call to TRANSLATE, however, specified that any occurrence of each of the individual characters be replaced with the character in the third argument in the same position.

Generally, you should use REPLACE whenever you need to replace a pattern of characters, while TRANSLATE is best applied to situations in which you need to replace or substitute individual characters in the string.

Remove characters from a string. What LPAD and RPAD giveth, TRIM, LTRIM, and RTRIM taketh away. Use these trim functions to remove characters from either the beginning (left) or end (right) of the string. Listing 6 shows an example of both RTRIM and LTRIM.

Code Listing 6: Examples of LTRIM and RTRIM functions 

DECLARE   a  VARCHAR2 (40)      := 'This sentence has too many periods....';   b  VARCHAR2 (40) := 'The number 1';BEGIN   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      RTRIM (a, '.'));   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      LTRIM (        b      , 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ '        || 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'));END; 

The output from this block is: 

This sentence has too many periods1 

RTRIM removed all the periods, because the second argument specifies the character (or characters) to trim, in this case, a period. The call to LTRIM demonstrates that you can specify multiple characters to trim. In this case, I asked that all letters and spaces be trimmed from the beginning of string b, and I got what I asked for.

The default behavior of both RTRIM and LTRIM is to trim spaces from the beginning or end of the string. Specifying RTRIM(a) is the same as asking for RTRIM(a,’ ‘). The same goes for LTRIM(a) and LTRIM(a,’ ‘).

The other trimming function is just plain TRIM. TRIM works a bit differently from LTRIM and RTRIM, as you can see in this block: 

DECLARE   x   VARCHAR2 (30)          := '.....Hi there!.....';BEGIN   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      TRIM (LEADING '.' FROM x));    DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      TRIM (TRAILING '.' FROM x));   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      TRIM (BOTH '.' FROM x));   --The default is to trim    --from both sides   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      TRIM ('.' FROM x));   --The default trim character    --is the space:   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (TRIM (x));END;

 

The output from this block is: 

Hi there!.....    .....Hi there!    Hi there!    Hi there!    .....Hi there!.....

 

With TRIM, you can trim from either side or from both sides. However, you can specify only a single character to remove. You cannot, for example, write the following: 

TRIM(BOTH ',.;' FROM x)

 

If you need to remove more than one character from the front and back of a string, you need to use RTRIM and LTRIM: 

RTRIM(LTRIM(x,',.;'),',.;')

 

You can also use TRANSLATE to remove characters from a string by replacing them with (or “translating” them into) NULL. You must, however, take care with how you specify this replacement. Suppose I want to remove all digits (0 through 9) from a string. My first attempt yields the following block: 

BEGIN   /* Remove all digits (0-9)       from the string. */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      TRANSLATE ('S1t2e3v4e56n'               , '1234567890'               , ''));END;/

 

When I execute this block, however, nothing (well, a NULL string) is displayed. This happens because if any of the arguments passed to TRANSLATE are NULL (or a zero-length string), the function returns a NULL value.

So all three arguments must be non-NULL, which means that you need to put at the start of the second and third arguments a character that will simply be replaced with itself, as in the following: 

BEGIN   /* Remove all digits (0-9)       from the string. */   DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (      TRANSLATE ('S1t2e3v4e56n'               , 'A1234567890'               , 'A'));END;/

 

Now, “A” is replaced with “A” and the remaining characters in the string are replaced with NULL, so the string “Steven” is then displayed.

Good to Know

Beyond awareness of the basic properties of strings in PL/SQL and built-in functions, you can benefit by keeping the following points about long strings and maximum string sizes in mind.

When the string is too long. You must specify a maximum length when you declare a variable based on the VARCHAR2 type. What happens, then, when you try to assign a value to that variable whose length is greater than the maximum? Oracle Database raises the ORA-06502 error, which is also defined in PL/SQL as the VALUE_ERROR exception.

Here is an example of the exception being raised and propagated out of the block unhandled: 

SQL> DECLARE  2    l_name VARCHAR2(3);  3  BEGIN  4    l_name := 'Steven';  5  END;  6  /DECLARE*ERROR at line 1:ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: character string buffer too smallORA-06512: at line 4

 

Here is a rewrite of the same block that traps the VALUE_ERROR exception: 

SQL> DECLARE  2    l_name   VARCHAR2 (3);  3  BEGIN  4    l_name := 'Steven';  5  EXCEPTION  6    WHEN VALUE_ERROR  7    THEN  8      DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (  9         'Value too large!'); 10  END; 11  /Value too large! 

 

Interestingly, if you try to insert or update a value in a VARCHAR2 column of a database table, Oracle Database raises a different  error, which you can see below: 

 

SQL> CREATE TABLE small_varchar2  2  (  3     string_value   VARCHAR2 (2)  4  )  5  /Table created.SQL> BEGIN  2     INSERT INTO small_varchar2  3          VALUES ('abc');  4  END;  5  /BEGIN*ERROR at line 1:ORA-12899: value too large for column "HR"."SMALL_VARCHAR2"."STRING_VALUE"(actual: 3, maximum: 2)ORA-06512: at line 2 

Different maximum sizes. There are a number of differences between SQL and PL/SQL for the maximum sizes for string datatypes. In PL/SQL, the maximum size for VARCHAR2 is 32,767 bytes, while in SQL the maximum is 4,000 bytes. In PL/SQL, the maximum size for CHAR is 32,767 bytes, while in SQL the maximum is 2,000 bytes.

Therefore, if you need to save a value from a VARCHAR2 variable in the column of a table, you might encounter the ORA-12899 error. If this happens, you have two choices: 

• Use SUBSTR to extract no more than 4,000 bytes from the larger string, and save that substring to the table. This option clearly has a drawback: you lose some of your data.

• Change the datatype of the column from VARCHAR2 to CLOB. This way, you can save all your data.

In PL/SQL, the maximum size for CLOB is 128 terabytes, while in SQL the maximum is just (4 GB - 1) * DB_BLOCK_SIZE.

 

There’s More to Data than Strings

Character data plays a very large role in PL/SQL applications, but those same applications undoubtedly also rely on data of other types, especially numbers and dates. I will cover these datatypes in the next PL/SQL 101 article. 

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present   by  dylan.