Export Results ORA-00936 Error Reported

Question

In an attempt to extract all of a package's source code in one file as well as work in a file-oriented fashion (which other posters have commented is not well supported), I issued a select dbms_metadata.get_ddl(...) from dual. This generated the output I wanted in the worksheet results. However, the ORA-00936 error is thrown when I try to export this as text to overwrite my (checked out from source control) file. My only recourse then becomes to copy the result, open my file (outside SQL-D) and replace what's there (which does work, by the way).
There was another post on this issue in a prior version where the error was attributed to double quotes around aliases, but I'm still getting the error (see Re: Export query results error, v. 5 / 1343

Answer 1

This is a bug with how SQL Developer does it's export (not that I could find it logged on MetaLink).
When you export a query, SQL Developer writes a wrapper select around your query to drive the export. In an example of what you are trying to do, it converts the following query (I added an alias to see if that helped, but it didn't):
select dbms_metadata.get_ddl('PACKAGE', 'MY_PKG') my_ddl from dual;
to (based on the trace file with sql_trace switched on):
select * from (select from ( select dbms_metadata.get_ddl('PACKAGE', 'MY_PKG') my_ddl from dual));
Your immediate options are to continue with your current workaround, switch to a query on DBA_SOURCE for this export, or cope with the way SQL Developer currently does it's file based development.
As far as getting this fixed (hopefully before 1.1), you would either need to log an SR on MetaLink or hope that one of the SQL Developer team logs a bug based on this thread.