How to read a specific value or a portion of text using utl_file.

Question

hi,
I have a small requirement which goes as follows. I have a text file which is a resultof the sql query and it contains 16 columns as PIPE delimited text . I am using the UTL_FILE package concept to read the data. In general when we use the UTL_FILE.GET_LINE we read the entire line of text. But i need to read the 10th column of the query or the PIPE delimited text .
Please advice.
My query goes something like this:
declare
f utl_file.file_type;
s long;
c number := 0;
begin
f := utl_file.fopen('ABC_EXTRACTS','sample1.txt','R');
loop
utl_file.get_line(f,s);
insert into s values (s);
c := c + 1;
end loop;
exception
when NO_DATA_FOUND then
utl_file.fclose(f);
dbms_output.put_line('No. of rows inserted : ' || c);
end;

Answer 1

Why don't you use varchar2 instead of long data type. I doubt you can read a portion from a file using utl_file but after doing the fetch you can do substring over the varchar2 variable and retrieve just the 10th column.
sample sql:
If your DB is 10g or higher, you can use the below regular expression to retrieve value based on your need.
PRAZY@11gR1> select regexp_substr('111|222|333|444|555|666|777|888|999|000|aaa|bbb|','[^|]+',1,10) from dual;
REG
000
Elapsed: 00:00:00.00Btwn, if the text file has fixed number of columns at all time, why don't you use a external table instead?
Regards,
Prazy
Edited by: Prazy on Mar 22, 2010 4:11 PM