Oracle PL/SQL : remove “space characters” from a string

Question

In my Oracle 10g database I would like to remove \"space characters\" (spaces, tabs, carriage returns...) from the values of a table field.

Is TRANSLATE() t

Answer 1

Since you're comfortable with regular expressions, you probably want to use the REGEXP_REPLACE function. If you want to eliminate anything that matches the [:space:] POSIX class

REGEXP_REPLACE( my_value, '[[:space:]]', '' )


SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf

  1  select '|' ||
  2         regexp_replace( 'foo ' || chr(9), '[[:space:]]', '' ) ||
  3         '|'
  4*   from dual
SQL> /

'|'||
-----
|foo|

If you want to leave one space in place for every set of continuous space characters, just add the + to the regular expression and use a space as the replacement character.

with x as (
  select 'abc 123  234     5' str
    from dual
)
select regexp_replace( str, '[[:space:]]+', ' ' )
  from x