Re: Doing a regexp-based search/replace?

Steve,

> I've got a table containing property_id's with values of the form
> ###-####.  I would like to discard the slash onwards (and I can't use
> a
> substr() because I am not guaranteed if a) the -#### portion exists,
> b)
> what position it exists from.
> 
> If this were a text file, I would use a sed expression such as:
> 
> cat textfile | sed 's/-.*$//'

In SQL/plpgsql, you can't do this with a single expression.  However,
you can do it with three expressions put together.

CREATE FUNCTION remove_propid_tail (VARCHAR ) RETURNS VARCHAR AS'
SELECT SUBSTR($1, 1, ((STRPOS($1, ''-'') - 1));
END;'
LANGUAGE 'SQL';

Then run:

UPDATE main_table SET property_id = remove_propid_tail(property_id)
WHERE property_id ~ '-';

-Josh

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