Question

I’m writing a SQLPlus report in which the recurring header contains an address for a business, followed by several relevant rows regarding that business, followed by the address for the next business:

BOB'S GUITARS 
123 SESAME STREET 
NEW YORK, NY 10001

customer name   last purchase date   last purchase amount
-------------   ------------------   --------------------

DAVE'S CIGARS 
456 MOCKINGBIRD LANE 
WASHINGTON, DC 12345

customer name   last purchase date   last purchase amount
-------------   ------------------   --------------------

The problem is this:

Some of those businesses have multi-line addresses, while others do not.

I can handle the basic case with something like
TTITLE CENTER BUSINESSNAME SKIP 1 CENTER ADDR1 SKIP 1 CENTER CITY

(where “CITY” is a variable containing city, state, and zip)

But I’m having a hard time figuring out how to put “add the second address line if ADDR2 is not null” without risking a blank line between ADDR1 and CITY.

In other words, I don’t want

BOB'S GUITARS
123 SESAME STREET

NEW YORK, NY 10001

in order to support

DAVE'S CIGARS
456 MOCKINGBIRD LANE
SUITE 101
WASHINGTON, DC 12345

EDIT / ADDITION:
The suggestion of the combination of nvl and decode was the right first step, but now I’ve run into the problem that the two-line “line” in question exceeds the report’s LINEWIDTH, and therefore gets truncated to LINEWIDTH character. Here’s the code I’m using to generate that line. Remember that both lines must be centered:

SELECT RPAD(' ', (79 - length(trim(address)))/2) 
  || trim(address) 
  || decode(nvl(trim(address_2), '='), '=', '', 
    CHR(10) 
    || RPAD(' ', (79 - length(trim(address_2)))/2, '-') 
    || trim(address_2) || ' ') ADDR1 from business

Answer 1

After consideration of the docs and analysis, it appears that this can’t be done. The (non-technical) solution was to press the business owners to accept a formatting that SQL*Plus could actually generate. They are satisfied with that solution.