Question

I have 3 rules which are strings like ‘483??’, ‘48310*‘, ’48*’ and I have a source string ‘483102334’ that has to be matched with the above rules to find a rule that matches the closest. In this example the closest match rule is ‘48310*’ since it matches with most number of digits in my source string. I want to acheive this in PL/SQL. Please help!

Answer 1

Something like this will work for the sample data you’ve provided. If you want ‘?’ to be treated differently than ‘*’, however, you’ll have to provide a bit more detail.

SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf

  1  with x as (
  2    select '483??' pattern from dual union all
  3    select '48310' pattern from dual union all
  4    select '48*' pattern from dual
  5  )
  6  select pattern
  7    from (
  8        select pattern,
  9               rank() over (order by utl_match.edit_distance( pattern, '483102334' )) rnk
 10          from x)
 11*  where rnk = 1
SQL> /

PATTE
-----
48310