I have found tons of questions like this, but none of them are 100% suitable for me. i have oracle 11g express
I have that string
'abcd,123,,defoifcd,"comma, in string",87765,,,hello'
it means normally a comma separates the data, but could be empty data (even more in a series), and if there is comma in the data it is quoted.
so far the best reg exp is that one
'("[^"]*"|[^,]+)'
but this puts at the end of all of the empty data using that query
with test as
(select
'abcd,123,,defoifcd,"comma, in string", 87765,,,hello'
str from dual
)
select REGEXP_SUBSTR(str, '("[^"]*"|[^,]+)', 1, rownum) split
from test
connect by level <= length (regexp_replace (str, '("[^"]*"|[^,]+)')) + 1;
i also tried replacing the empty data with ,n/a, so to have
'abcd,123,n/a,defoifcd,"comma, in string",87765,n/a,n/a,hello'
but regexp_replace replaces only the first occurence of the empty data
select
regexp_replace('abcd,123,,defoifcd,"comma, in string",87765,,,hello', '(,,)', ',n/a,')
str from dual;
thanks in advance!
This seems to work and handles NULLs:
SQL> with test as
(select
'abcd,123,,defoifcd,"comma, in string", 87765,,,hello'
str from dual
)
select trim('"' from REGEXP_SUBSTR(str, '(".*?"|.*?)(,|$)', 1, level, NULL, 1)) split
from test
connect by level<=length(regexp_replace(str,'".*?"|[^,]*'))+1;
SPLIT
----------------------------------------------------
abcd
123
defoifcd
comma, in string
87765
hello
9 rows selected.
SQL>
This post provided the impetus for the solution: https://community.oracle.com/thread/528107?tstart=0