How to write regular expression to find desired string piece *duplicate*

Question

Hi All,
Suppose that i have following string piece:
name:ali#lastname:kemal#name:mehmet#lastname:cemalI need
ali
mehmetI use following statement
SQL> select lst, regexp_replace(lst,'(name:)(.*)(lastname)(.*)','\2',1,1) nm from (
  2    select 'name:ali#lastname:kemal#name:mehmet#lastname:cemal' as lst from dual
  3  );
LST                                                NM
name:ali#lastname:kemal#name:mehmet#lastname:cemal ali#lastname:kemal#name:mehmet#
SQL> But it does not return names correctly. When i change 5th parameter(occurence) of regexp_replace built-in function(e.g. 1,2), i may get ali and mehmet respectiveley.
Any ideas about regexp?
Note : I can use PL/SQL instr/substr for this manner; but i do not want to use them. I need regexp.
Regards...
Mennan
Edited by: mennan on Jul 4, 2010 9:53 PM
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Answer 1

The approach is to do cartesian join to a 'number' table returning number of records equal to number of names in the string.I have hardcoded 2 but you can use regexp_count to get the number of occurrences of the pattern in the string and then use level <=regexp_count(..... .
See below for the approach
with cte as(
select
'name:ali#lastname:kemal#name:mehmet#lastname:cemal' col ,level lev
from dual connect by level <=2)
select substr(regexp_substr('#'||col,'#name:\w+',1,lev),7)
from cte
/