A doubt on REG EXP

Question

Hi friends,
Please clarify the following doubt in Reg Exp.
Table EMP has following EMP_NAMEs:
============
Anand
Bala_G
Chitra
David_C
Elango
Fathima
============
We have a set of characters as "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789".
Now we need to find the count of EMP_NAMES whose characters (any) are not in the list of characters in the above list. In this example, the result should be 2. i.e., 'Bala_D' and 'David_C'. The query should be like:
Declare
v_string varchar2(50) := 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789';
v_count number(6);
Begin
select count(*)
into v_count
from emp
where regexp_like(emp_name, v_string);
dbms_output.put_line(v_count);
end;
========================
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Hi,
Welcome to the forum!
To use REGEXP_LIKE, you could say:
WHERE     REGEXP_LIKE ( emp_name
              , '[^abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789]'
              )However, it will be faster not to use regular expressions:
WHERE   LTRIM ( emp_name
           , 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789'
           )          IS NOT NULLEdited by: Frank Kulash on Oct 10, 2012 4:18 PM
Removed extra single-quote, after DAMorgan, below.