Effective way to parse key-value pair.

Question

Hi,
I've a PL/SQL process, in which I've lot of dynamic sql routines planned, to parse input data to a procedure.
One of the parameter to call or that'd be passed to this procedure is a "key-value pair"
e.g.
procedure p ( id in number, state_name in varchar2 )
Values could be
20, 'vc1=AZ, vc2=WA, vc3=NY, vc4=NJ'
My requirement is as follows
<ol><li>Parse 'state_name', for values of state ( AZ, WA, NY, NJ ) - note that the list could be of variable length</li>
<li>I'm not interested in 'key' per se ( vc1, vc2, vc3... )</li>
<li>State names are important as ( as ) part of the process, I want to concatenate them to form tables-name,
     which (already) exists e.g. table_CA, table_AZ, table_WA, table_NJ - so basically I need to
     parse these names and have them in a way to be able to use them as part of other dynamic SQL's.
</li>
</ol>
Please advice.
Thanks.

Answer 1

shankariyer wrote:
Is it possible for me to populate the output of this regex_replace into an array of varchar2 ??
Sure:
CREATE OR REPLACE
  TYPE STATE_TBL_TYPE
    AS
      TABLE OF VARCHAR2(2);
SET SERVEROUTPUT ON
DECLARE
    v_value_pair VARCHAR2(30) := 'vc1=AZ, vc2=WA, vc3=NY, vc4=NJ';
    v_state_tbl  STATE_TBL_TYPE := STATE_TBL_TYPE();
BEGIN
    FOR v_i IN 1..NVL(LENGTH(v_value_pair) - LENGTH(REPLACE(v_value_pair,',')) + 1,0) LOOP
      v_state_tbl.EXTEND;
      v_state_tbl(v_i) := LTRIM(REGEXP_SUBSTR(v_value_pair,'=[A-Z]+',1,v_i),'=');
    END LOOP;
    FOR v_i IN 1..v_state_tbl.COUNT LOOP
      DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(v_state_tbl(v_i));
    END LOOP;
END;
SQL> SET SERVEROUTPUT ON
SQL> DECLARE
  2      v_value_pair VARCHAR2(30) := 'vc1=AZ, vc2=WA, vc3=NY, vc4=NJ';
  3      v_state_tbl  STATE_TBL_TYPE := STATE_TBL_TYPE();
  4  BEGIN
  5      FOR v_i IN 1..NVL(LENGTH(v_value_pair) - LENGTH(REPLACE(v_value_pair,',')) + 1,0) LOOP
  6        v_state_tbl.EXTEND;
  7        v_state_tbl(v_i) := LTRIM(REGEXP_SUBSTR(v_value_pair,'=[A-Z]+',1,v_i),'=');
  8      END LOOP;
  9      FOR v_i IN 1..v_state_tbl.COUNT LOOP
10        DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(v_state_tbl(v_i));
11      END LOOP;
12  END;
13  /
AZ
WA
NY
NJ
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SQL> SY.