REGEXP_INSTR on a multi line string

Question

Hello ,
I am trying to search through a string that is stored with multi line and trying to find the first occurrence of a character.
For example : The string is -
"This is a sample
text to test
from [first string] to [second string] "
When i try to search for the first occurrence of "[" and "]" regular instr function is returning the complete string
This is the query i used:
The above string is stored in a varchar2 column named - comments
select substr(comments,instr(comments,'['),instr(comments,']')) from my_table
This above query returns : [first string] to [second string]
i assume instr returns the first occurence of a letter in the given string. i was looking for [first string] but it returns me both. Can this be replaced with regexp_instr function?.
Any help on this would be much appreciated.
Thanks

Answer 1

user619203 wrote:
Hello ,
I am trying to search through a string that is stored with multi line and trying to find the first occurrence of a character.
For example : The string is -
"This is a sample
text to test
from [first string] to [second string] "
When i try to search for the first occurrence of "[" and "]" regular instr function is returning the complete string
This is the query i used:
The above string is stored in a varchar2 column named - comments
select substr(comments,instr(comments,'['),instr(comments,']')) from my_table
This above query returns : [first string] to [second string]
i assume instr returns the first occurence of a letter in the given string. i was looking for [first string] but it returns me both. Can this be replaced with regexp_instr function?.
Any help on this would be much appreciated.
Thankslike this?
SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf
  1  with tmp as
  2  (
  3  select 'This is a sample
  4  text to test
  5  from [first string] to [second string]' txt from dual)
  6  select substr(txt, instr(txt, '['), instr(txt, ']') - instr(txt, '[') + 1)
  7* from   tmp
SQL> /
SUBSTR(TXT,INS
[first string]Also questions of these types are better asked in {forum:id=75} forum.