Extracting data from clobs

Question

Hi,
I want to get the first line from a comments field. The data type is set to clob. I use the below section to get the data from the first line
Replace(dbms_lob.substr(comments,instr(comments,chr(10),1),1), Chr(10), '' ) from
The issue I have is it only gets the first line if there is a second comments line due to the character line feed.
Is there a way of just getting the data back from the first line only even if the length of the line varies?
Thanks regards
Adam
Edited by: user3924223 on 30-Jan-2009 06:51

Answer 1

Adam
You can try
select substr ( comments                       -- you want to pull out a varchar
                   , 1                                   -- if you want the very first line
                   ,  case instr(comments,chr(10)) when 0 then 100 else instr(comments,chr(10)) end    -- capture to chr(10) if present, or to 100 chars if not
from   yourtable
/Note: if the CLOB is longer than the max SQL varchar supported on your Oracle version (4000 on 9i iirc), you can use DBMS_LOB.SUBSTR and DBMS_LOB.INSTR. If you are doing this programmatically rather than in SQL, you can save the INSTR result into a local variable
HTH
Regards Nigel