Question

I have three columns in an sqlite table:

    Column1    Column2    Column3
    A          1          1
    A          1          2
    A          12         2
    C          13         2
    B          11         2

I need to select Column1-Column2-Column3 (e.g. A-01-0001). I want to pad each column with a -.

Answer 1

The || operator is “concatenate” – it joins together the two strings of
its operands.

From http://www.sqlite.org/lang_expr.html

For padding, the seemingly-cheater way I’ve used is to start with your target string, say ‘0000’, concatenate ‘0000423’, then substr(result, -4, 4) for ‘0423’.

Update: Looks like there is no native implementation of “lpad” or “rpad” in SQLite, but you can follow along (basically what I proposed) here: http://verysimple.com/2010/01/12/sqlite-lpad-rpad-function/

-- the statement below is almost the same as
-- select lpad(mycolumn,'0',10) from mytable

select substr('0000000000' || mycolumn, -10, 10) from mytable

-- the statement below is almost the same as
-- select rpad(mycolumn,'0',10) from mytable

select substr(mycolumn || '0000000000', 1, 10) from mytable

Here’s how it looks:

SELECT col1 || '-' || substr('00'||col2, -2, 2) || '-' || substr('0000'||col3, -4, 4)

it yields

"A-01-0001"
"A-01-0002"
"A-12-0002"
"C-13-0002"
"B-11-0002"