Question

I have the following string in Oracle as one continuous line, where instead of displaying this information as one continuous string, I actually would like to append a carriage return/new line before ever occurrence of “:F” and “:L”, which would also require the removal of the “:” before F and L

So current string:

F:AA BB:F:BB CC dd:F:ZZ Xx Y:L:Hello:F:Goodbye

Newly displayed string:

F:AA BB
F:BB CC dd
F:ZZ Xx Y
L:Hello
F:Goodbye

Trying to achieve this as a concise function in Oracle pl/sql, so that I can pass in the current string and get back the new string with carriage return/new line breaks.

Answer 1

I don’t think you need regex. The simple replace should do the trick.

new_val := REPLACE( REPLACE( string_val, ':F:', CHR(10)||'F:' )
                  , ':L:', CHR(10)||'L:' );

That gives unix style new lines. If you want windows newlines then you need to use CHR(13)||CHR(10) instead of just CHR(10).

And you can use this just the same in a query too.