Instr to pick up anything before the last dot

Question

This is on oracle 10.2.0.3 on unix using sqlplus
I am trying to write a select statement that picks up anything after the first - (dash) symbol and before the last . (dot) in a string.
I got the first part right -- to pick up anything after the first dash
SELECT SUBSTR('P3834_MD-1.14.script', INSTR('P3834_MD-1.14.script','.' )-1)
FROM dual;
1.14.script
How do I further string this down so that it retrieves me everything that is before the last . (dot) which is 1.14
I may have several dots, for example 1.1.33.4.script . I still need 1.1.33.4

Answer 1

Hi,
In Oracle 10 (and up) that kind of thing is much easier using regular expressions.
To find everything from the first '-' through the last '.' in a string s:
REGEXP_SUBSTR ( s
              , '-'         -- hyphen
                || '.*'     -- 0 or more characters (period matches anything)
                || '\.'     -- period (escaped because period has special meaning)
              )Using INSTR, you can give -1 as the third argument to tell INSTR to search backwards from the end of the string:
INSTR ( s
      , -1
      )