Trim Whitespaces (New Line and Tab space) in a String in Oracle

Question

I need to trim New Line (Chr(13) and Chr(10) and Tab space from the beginning and end of a String) in an Oracle query. I learnt that there is no easy way to trim multiple charac

Answer 1

If you have Oracle 10g, REGEXP_REPLACE is pretty flexible.

Using the following string as a test:

chr(9) || 'Q   qwer' || chr(9) || chr(10) ||
chr(13) || 'qwerqwer     qwerty' || chr(9) || 
chr(10) || chr(13)

The [[:space:]] will remove all whitespace, and the ([[:cntrl:]])|(^\t) regexp will remove non-printing characters and tabs.

select
    tester,
    regexp_replace(tester, '(^[[:space:]]+)|([[:space:]]+$)',null)
            regexp_tester_1,
    regexp_replace(tester, '(^[[:cntrl:]^\t]+)|([[:cntrl:]^\t]+$)',null) 
            regexp_tester_2
from
    (
    select
        chr(9) || 'Q   qwer' || chr(9) || chr(10) ||
                chr(13) || 'qwerqwer     qwerty' || chr(9) || 
                chr(10) || chr(13) tester 
    from 
        dual
    )

Returning:

• REGEXP_TESTER_1: "Qqwerqwerqwerqwerty"
• REGEXP_TESTER_2: "Q qwerqwerqwer qwerty"

Hope this is of some use.

Answer 2

How about the quick and dirty translate function?

This will remove all occurrences of each character in string1:

SELECT translate(
           translate(
               translate(string1, CHR(10), '')
           , CHR(13), '')
       , CHR(09), '') as massaged
FROM BLAH;

Regexp_replace is an option, but you may see a performance hit depending on how complex your expression is.

Answer 3

If at all anyone is looking to convert data in 1 variable that lies in 2 or 3 different lines like below

'Data1

Data2'

And you want to display data as 'Data1 Data2' then use below

select TRANSLATE ('Data1

Data2', ''||CHR(10), ' ') from dual;

it took me hrs to get the right output. Thanks to me I just saved you 1 or 2 hrs :)

Answer 4

For what version of Oracle? 10g+ supports regexes - see this thread on the OTN Discussion forum for how to use REGEXP_REPLACE to change non-printable characters into ''.

Answer 5

Below code can be used to Remove New Line and Table Space in text column

Select replace(replace(TEXT,char(10),''),char(13),'')

Answer 6

This how I would implement it:

     REGEXP_REPLACE(text,'(^[[:space:]]*|[[:space:]]*$)')