How to find out the number of occurence of special character

Question

Hi ,
I have a string coming coming in I/p which is like '1;2;100;201;'
I need to break up this string and run my process for each value ( i.e for 1,2,100 and 201).
How i can know the count of number of occurences of ';' character?
How i can loop so that it runs once for each value?

Answer 1

1. Split, pre Oracle 10g...
===========================
with t as (select '10,aaaa,20,vvvvv,30,xxx''xx,12,12,56' txt from dual)
select substr( txt
             , decode(level, 1, 1, instr(txt, ',', 1, level-1)+1)
             , decode(instr(txt, ',', 1, level), 0, length(txt), instr(txt, ',', 1, level)
               - decode(level, 1, 0, instr(txt, ',', 1, level-1))-1)
             ) val
from t
connect by level <= length(txt)-length(replace(txt,','))+1
VAL
10
aaaa
20
vvvvv
30
xxx'xx
12
12
56
9 rows selected.2. Split, 10g onwards using regular expressions
===============================================
with t as (select 'aaaa,,bbbb,cccc,dddd,eeee,ffff' as txt from dual)
-- end of sample data
select REGEXP_SUBSTR (txt, '[^,]+', 1, level)
from t
connect by level <= length(regexp_replace(txt,'[^,]*'))+1
REGEXP_SUBSTR(TXT,'[^,]+',1,LE
aaaa
bbbb
cccc
dddd
eeee
ffff
7 rows selected.example usage with varying IN clause...
SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf
  1  select *
  2  from emp
  3  where ename in (
  4    with t as (select '&input_string' as txt from dual)
  5    select REGEXP_SUBSTR (txt, '[^,]+', 1, level)
  6    from t
  7    connect by level <= length(regexp_replace(txt,'[^,]*'))+1
  8*   )
SQL> /
Enter value for input_string: SCOTT,JAMES
old   4:   with t as (select '&input_string' as txt from dual)
new   4:   with t as (select 'SCOTT,JAMES' as txt from dual)
     EMPNO ENAME      JOB              MGR HIREDATE                   SAL       COMM     DEPTNO
      7788 SCOTT      ANALYST         7566 19-04-1987 00:00:00       3000                    20
      7900 JAMES      CLERK           7698 03-12-1981 00:00:00        950                    30
SQL>3. Split 10g onwards using XMLTABLE...
======================================
SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf
  1  with t as (select 'This is some sample text that needs splitting into words' as txt from dual)
  2  select x.*
  3  from t
  4      ,xmltable('x/y'
  5                passing xmltype('<x><y>'||replace(t.txt,' ','</y><y>')||'</y></x>')
  6                columns word varchar2(20) path '.'
  7*              ) x
SQL> /
WORD
This
is
some
sample
text
that
needs
splitting
into
words
10 rows selected.