Question

I have the following rows in my table

COL1                       EXTRA         DOUBLE       TEST
12 TEST
123 EXTRA
125 EXTRA 95 DOUBLE
EXTRA 45 99 DOUBLE 

I am using regular expressions to filter out the rows and move them appropriately to different columns. So:

• For the first row, I want 12 to be extracted and put in column TEST.
• For the second row, I want 123 to be extracted and put in column EXTRA.
• For 3rd row, I want 125 to be extracted and put in column EXTRA.
• I want to ignore 95.
• For the last row, I want 45 to be extracted and put in column EXTRA.

I can extract the values and put them in appropriate columns through my query, I am using this regular expression for extracting the values:

'%[0-9]%[^A-Z]%[0-9]%'

the problem with this regular expression is that it extracts 12, but it does not extract 123 from the second row, if I change the regular expression to:

'%[0-9]*%[^A-Z]%[0-9]%' 

then it extracts 123, but for the third row, it concatenates 125 with 95 so I get 12595. Is there any way I can avoid 95 and just get the value 125? If I remove the star then it does not do any concatenation.

Any help will be appreciated. I posted this question before, but some of you were asking for more explanation so I posted a new question for that.

Answer 1

I believe that the regex that you are looking for is below. This will match digits followed by numbers, followed by ignoring any future number patterns. However, I believe that when you use the %regex%regex%…, that it runs each regex separately, so I am not sure about the nuances of regex in SQL. However, if you run this against rubular.com it seems to solve the problem you are asking. Hopefully it can be of some use in your regex search 🙂

([0-9]*)([^A-Z])(?>[0-9]*)

However, I did just look at your other examples of the letters coming first, and that would not work here. But, maybe this can still be of use to you