Files with pipe lines

Question

I have written a package which imports data into my database from a file whose information is delimited by pipes. I use a function that separates the data delimited by the pipes and treats it like different information as Name, Surname, Age, Location.
Below the example(1):
Paul|Simon|33|Scotland
Rachel|Smith|28|EnglandThe package compiles correctly, but when I debug it, it erros with the following:
Oracle Error :: ORA-06533
Subscript beyond countI have noticed that if I add a pipe at the end of each line, the error does not occur and everything gets imported as I want it to.
Example(2):
Paul|Simon|33|Scotland|
Rachel|Smith|28|England|Unfortunately, the files comes in from an external source and cannot be modified with the extra pipe.
Can anyone suggest a way to fix this issue, please?
Thanks
PS: I am using collections.
The split function was found on this website http://www.orafaq.com/forum/t/11692/0/ in the last reply from Barbara Boehmer

Answer 1

If I use external tables, I suppose I can point the
second part of the package to the external table and
do the upload from there?Yes, of course, did you already use external tables ? See this example :
$ cat names.dat
Paul|Simon|33|Scotland
Rachel|Smith|28|England
$ sqlplus test/test
SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.3.0 - Production on Sun Nov 25 23:05:46 2007
Copyright (c) 1982, 2006, Oracle.  All Rights Reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.3.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options
TEST@db102 > CREATE TABLE ext_tab (
  2  name       varchar2(20),
  3  surname    varchar2(20),
  4  age        number,
  5  location varchar2(30)
  6  )
  7  ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL
  8  ( TYPE ORACLE_LOADER
  9  DEFAULT DIRECTORY work
10  ACCESS PARAMETERS ( RECORDS DELIMITED BY NEWLINE
11  fields terminated by '|'
12  )
13  LOCATION ( 'names.dat' ))
14  REJECT LIMIT UNLIMITED
TEST@db102 > /
Table created.
TEST@db102 > select * from ext_tab;
NAME                 SURNAME                     AGE LOCATION
Paul                 Simon                        33 Scotland
Rachel               Smith                        28 England
TEST@db102 >