RE: Oracle 10g SQL - Parsing Delimited String

>> Nate served it out to me in a golden platter

Well… that depends :)

It might only be a silver platter depending on what happens next.  If a subtle bug shows up, will you be able to debug and solve it?

Sometimes it’s better to go with a not-quite-so-elegant solution in order to resolve any issues later… or even make changes to it.

I am totally green on regular expressions so I don’t know if Nate’s solution is perfect or if it’ll choke on some special character in a different data format – like French characters.

How about if a change is required and the business rules want a second character ignored in the selection?

Ultimately, it’s up to you to test the solution against the data you’re providing the solution for.

A developer should always know what will happen to his code when any value is passed in to it.  Either the value is expected and handled properly, or the value is invalid and should be trapped in an appropriate exception mechanism.

Roger S.

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