Question

I have a string from oracle table like this:

 SELECT col1 FROM MyTable;
 col1
 part1;part2;part3
 ....

How can I get a substring from col1 such as part2?

 SELECT col1, INSTR(col1, ';', 1, ...) SubStrPart2 // string func?
 col1       SubStrPart2
 ....       part2

Not sure what string functions I can use here so that I can easily update it to get a specific sub-string part out?

Answer 1

If you want to split out on semi-colons, you could try something like this:

select col1
     , regexp_substr(col1, '^[^;]') as part1
     , replace(regexp_substr(col1, ';[^;]+;'), ';') as part2
     , replace(regexp_substr(col1, ';[^;]+$'), ';') as part3

The replace function removes any occurence of the second parameter if third parameter is not given.