Hi Lars,
Lars Schwarz wrote:
hi all, is there any shorthand to extract the string part of a varchar
field
only?
like when having german street addresses (e.g. foostreet 23) in a varchar
field
and i want to select the non-numeric part of it (foostreet) only?
I can't think of a way to do this in MySQL. In MS SQL Server there's a PATINDEX
function I used for similar tasks, but I don't think there's anything like that in MySQL.
You could simulate it with an incredibly ugly hack: make a user function that returns
the first occurrence of a digit. You might find the LEAST, COALESCE, NULLIF, and
LOCATE functions helpful for this. But it will not be pleasant.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a really nifty way to do it with a table of integers
and a cross join against every substring with a MIN(), but I'd be surprised if it's
efficient.
I think you're best off doing it in client code with a regular expression.
Baron
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