Question

I need to extract string from a value of a cell in Oracle table. How can I do that?

VALUE
--------
/var1/var2/var3/C751994ZP1QT11/var4.itp

I want to extract “C751994ZP1QT11” from the value using SQL. I searched some function like REGEXP_LIKE, but I am not quite understand how to use it.

Thanks ahead for the help.

Answer 1

If you want to extract a string, you need to use regexp_substr(). regexp_like() would return a boolean indicating if a certain regular expression matches your string, while regexp_substr() actually returns the matched string.

In your case, assuming you want the string between /** and **/, you could use something like this:

select 
  regexp_substr(
    '/var1/var2/var3/**C751994ZP1QT11**/var4.itp', 
    '/\*\*.*\*\*/') 
from dual

Refer here for some useful shortcuts on regular expressions with Oracle.