IN clause of oracle

Question

Hi Everyone,
I have a column A defined as VARCHAR2 in table1 which will contain numeric data separated by Comma(,). I have to pull data from another table by using the values present in column A of Table A.
Table 1:
A ID
1,2,3 123
Table B
A_A Name
1 test1
2 test2
query:
select * from Table_B where A_A in ( select A from Table_1 where ID=123).
Issue: Sub query returning Character value. So the query is returning NULL.
Can somebody help me on this.
Thanks in advance !!!
Edited by: 871132 on Aug 18, 2011 9:26 AM

Answer 1

You'd need to parse the string stored in A into a collection of numbers. Something like Tom Kyte's str2tbl function. Something like
SQL> create or replace type myTableType as table of number;
  2  /
Type created.
SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf
  1  create or replace function str2tbl( p_str in varchar2 ) return myTableType
  2    as
  3        l_str   long default p_str || ',';
  4        l_n        number;
  5        l_data    myTableType := myTabletype();
  6    begin
  7        loop
  8            l_n := instr( l_str, ',' );
  9            exit when (nvl(l_n,0) = 0);
10            l_data.extend;
11            l_data( l_data.count ) := ltrim(rtrim(substr(l_str,1,l_n-1)));
12            l_str := substr( l_str, l_n+1 );
13        end loop;
14        return l_data;
15*   end;
SQL> /
Function created.
SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf
  1  with t1 as (
  2    select '1,2,3' a, 123 id from dual
  3  )
  4  ,t2 as (
  5    select 1 a_a, 'test1' name from dual
  6    union all
  7    select 2, 'test2' from dual
  8  )
  9  select *
10    from t2
11   where a_a in (select *
12                   from table(select str2tbl(a)
13                                from t1
14*                              where id=123))
SQL> /
       A_A NAME
         1 test1
         2 test2Justin