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Asked: 2026-05-26T06:12:05+00:00

It seems really easy if you are using SQL*Plus to use SQL> set markup

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It seems really easy if you are using SQL*Plus to use 

SQL> set markup html on;

and get some lovely results to the SQL*Plus window. we have an oracle job that runs overnight and sends an email of results to a number of people. I would like to wrap a sql statement in an HTML table to be in that message. What is the best way of doing that?

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  1. Editorial Team

    From posting over On the DBA site I got close to the answer that I was looking for. Tom Kyte has a great blog post with a function that does exactly what I was hoping for. In short here is what I implemented:

    I created a function that took a sys_refcursor as a variable:

    CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION fncRefCursor2HTML(rf SYS_REFCURSOR)  RETURN CLOB
IS
    lRetVal      CLOB;
    lHTMLOutput  XMLType; 
    lXSL         CLOB;
    lXMLData     XMLType;

    lContext     DBMS_XMLGEN.CTXHANDLE;
BEGIN
    -- get a handle on the ref cursor --
    lContext := DBMS_XMLGEN.NEWCONTEXT(rf);
    -- setNullHandling to 1 (or 2) to allow null columns to be displayed --
    DBMS_XMLGEN.setNullHandling(lContext,1);
    -- create XML from ref cursor --
    lXMLData := DBMS_XMLGEN.GETXMLTYPE(lContext,DBMS_XMLGEN.NONE);

    -- this is a generic XSL for Oracle's default XML row and rowset tags --
    -- " " is a non-breaking space --
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[ <xsl:output method="html"/>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[ <xsl:template match="/">]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[ <html>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[  <body>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[   <table border="1">]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[     <tr bgcolor="cyan">]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[      <xsl:for-each select="/ROWSET/ROW[1]/*">]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[       <th><xsl:value-of select="name()"/></th>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[      </xsl:for-each>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[     </tr>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[     <xsl:for-each select="/ROWSET/*">]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[      <tr>]';    
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[       <xsl:for-each select="./*">]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[        <td><xsl:value-of select="text()"/> </td>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[       </xsl:for-each>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[      </tr>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[     </xsl:for-each>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[   </table>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[  </body>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[ </html>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[ </xsl:template>]';
    lXSL := lXSL || q'[</xsl:stylesheet>]';

    -- XSL transformation to convert XML to HTML --
    lHTMLOutput := lXMLData.transform(XMLType(lXSL));
    -- convert XMLType to Clob --
    lRetVal := lHTMLOutput.getClobVal();

    RETURN lRetVal;
END;

    Then to test it in a Test window in PL/SQL Developer

    declare 
  l_cursor sys_refcursor;
begin
  open l_cursor for select * from employees;
  :x:= fncRefCursor2HTML(l_cursor);
  close l_cursor;  
end;

    This is something that I have been hoping to find for a long time. THANKS Tom Kyte!

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