Question

In Oracle, I have a table with a column (X) which can have strings like this:

97M

481

101X
88
21E
etc.

I want to select just those rows where the integral value of x > 90. In this example, I would expect to get back the rows containing values 97M, 101X and 481. How can I do this?

Answer 1

You can always use translate to remove alpha characters.

TO_NUMBER(translate('90F', '1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUFWXYZ', '1')) -- = 90

Translate does a 1 to 1 translation of the characters in the second argument to the characters in the third argument.

Here’s a different example.

translate('ABCDEFG', 'ABC', 'XYZ') = 'XYZDEFG'

A -> X
B -> Y
C -> Z

Now if you look at my example

translate('90F', '1ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUFWXYZ', '1')

1 -> 1 (this is here because if that last argument is null, you'll get an empty string)
A -> ? there's nothing here, so oracle will translate it to nothing
B -> same as above