Question

I’m doing a bit of work which requires me to truncate DB2 character-based fields. Essentially, I need to discard all text which is found at or after the first alphabetic character.

e.g.

102048994BLAHBLAHBLAH

becomes:-

102048994

In SQL Server, this would be a doddle – PATINDEX would swoop in and save the day. Much celebration would ensue.

My problem is that I need to do this in DB2. Worse, the result needs to be used in a join query, also in DB2. I can’t find an easy way to do this. Is there a PATINDEX equivalent in DB2?

Is there another way to solve this problem?

If need be, I’ll hardcode 26 chained LOCATE functions to get my result, but if there is a better way, I am all ears.

Answer 1

SELECT TRANSLATE(lower(column), ' ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz') 
FROM table