Please - immediate help needed parsing csv values into multiple rows

Question

Hello, we have a very immediate need to be able to parse out a field of comma separated values into individual rows. The following is an example written in SQL Server syntax which does not work in Oracle.
The tricky part is that each ROUTES can be a different length, and each CSV can have a different number of routes in it.
Here is an example of the table ("Quotes") of CSV values I want to normalize:
TPNUMBER ROUTES
1001 1, 56W, 18
1002 2, 16, 186, 28
Here is an example of what I need it to look like:
TPNUMBER ROUTES
1001 1
1001 56W
1001 18
1002 2
1002 16
1002 186
1002 28
Here is the "Tally" table for the query below:
ID
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
And finally, here is the query which parses CSV values into multiple rows but which does not work in Oralce:
SELECT TPNUMBER,
NullIf(SubString(',' + ROUTES + ',' , ID , CharIndex(',' , ',' + ROUTES + ',' , ID) - ID) , '') AS ONEROUTE
FROM Tally, Quotes
WHERE ID <= Len(',' + ROUTES + ',') AND SubString(',' + Phrase + ',' , ID - 1, 1) = ','
AND CharIndex(',' , ',' + ROUTES + ',' , ID) - ID > 0
It may be necessary to use a cursor to loop through the CSV table and process each row (a loop within another loop...) but this is beyond my comprehesion of PL/SQL.
Many thanks in advance for your advice/help.
apk

Answer 1

Not sure what you are trying to do with the last step, but this should work for the first part. I assume you would use sqlldr but I just did inserts instead. You might need more than 5 "routes" in the csv. You could put some reasonable max on that number of columns:
SQL>create table t_csv
2 (TPNUMBER varchar2(20),
3 ROUTE_1 VARCHAR2(5),
4 ROUTE_2 VARCHAR2(5),
5 ROUTE_3 VARCHAR2(5),
6 ROUTE_4 VARCHAR2(5),
7 ROUTE_5 VARCHAR2(5),
8 ROUTE_6 VARCHAR2(5) );
Table created.
SQL>INSERT INTO t_csv (TPNUMBER,ROUTE_1,ROUTE_2) values( '1001 1', '56W', '18' );
1 row created.
SQL>INSERT INTO t_csv (TPNUMBER,ROUTE_1,ROUTE_2,ROUTE_3) values( '1002 2', '16', '186', '28');
1 row created.
SQL>create table t_quotes(
2 tpnumber NUMBER,
3 routes VARCHAR2(5));
Table created.
SQL>DECLARE
2 L_tpnumber NUMBER;
3 L_route VARCHAR2(5);
4 begin
5 for rec in (select * from t_csv) loop
6 L_tpnumber := SUBSTR(rec.tpnumber,1,INSTR(rec.tpnumber,' ')-1);
7 L_route := SUBSTR(rec.tpnumber,INSTR(rec.tpnumber,' ')+1);
8 insert into t_quotes values( L_tpnumber, l_route );
9 if rec.route_1 is not null then
10 insert into t_quotes values( L_tpnumber, rec.route_1 );
11 end if;
12 if rec.route_2 is not null then
13 insert into t_quotes values( L_tpnumber, rec.route_2 );
14 end if;
15 if rec.route_3 is not null then
16 insert into t_quotes values( L_tpnumber, rec.route_3 );
17 end if;
18 if rec.route_4 is not null then
19 insert into t_quotes values( L_tpnumber, rec.route_4 );
20 end if;
21 if rec.route_5 is not null then
22 insert into t_quotes values( L_tpnumber, rec.route_5 );
23 end if;
24 end loop;
25 end;
26 /
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SQL> select tpnumber, routes from t_quotes;
TPNUMBER ROUTE
1001 1
1001 56W
1001 18
1002 2
1002 16
1002 186
1002 28
7 rows selected.