Question

I have a column which contains data like this

     1  Virginia - VA,Maryland -MD,null
     2  California - CA,Nebraska - NE,Minnesota - MN
     3  Wyoming - WY,null,null

and so forth.
Is there a way i can modify the column using string functions to look like this from plain sql?

     1 VA,MD
     2 CA,NE,MN
     3 WY

Answer 1

Assuming there’s nothing you can do with respect to your data, you can extract those values using REGEXP_REPLACE:

SELECT id, REPLACE(REGEXP_REPLACE(column_name, '[^-]+ - ?([A-Z]{2},?)', '\1'), 
           ',null', '')
FROM your_table

Here’s a working DEMO.