REGEXP_REPLACE - remove words

Question

Hi everybody,
I have a quite tricky problem and I hope someone can help...
Imagine the following set of data:
WITH my_data AS
   SELECT 'abc.1.fil' as x FROM dual
    UNION ALL
   SELECT 'def.ol.fil' FROM dual
    UNION ALL
   SELECT 'ghi.ijk.olfil' FROM dual
    UNION ALL
   SELECT 'mno.12.olfil' FROM dual
    UNION ALL
   SELECT 'abc. .fil' as x FROM dual
SELECT  
  REGEXP_REPLACE(x, '(.*)(.ol.fil|.fil|.olfil)$', '\1')
FROM my_data;I need to remove from the end of the string the patterns .fil; .ol.fil and .olfil. But, I don't have the right result with my expression. In this case instead of having this:
abc.1
def
ghi.ijk
mno.12
abc. I'm having this:
abc.1
def.ol
ghi.ijk.o
mno.12.o
abc. Any suggestion? I'm using Oracle 10.2.
Thanks,

Answer 1

You could do the following:
SQL> WITH my_data AS
  2  (
  3     SELECT 'abc.1.fil' as x FROM dual
  4      UNION ALL
  5     SELECT 'def.ol.fil' FROM dual
  6      UNION ALL
  7     SELECT 'ghi.ijk.olfil' FROM dual
  8      UNION ALL
  9     SELECT 'mno.12.olfil' FROM dual
10      UNION ALL
11     SELECT 'abc. .fil' as x FROM dual
12  )
13  select trim(replace(replace(x,'.fil'),'.olfil')) as cleaned
14  from my_data;
CLEANED
abc.1
def.ol
ghi.ijk
mno.12
abc.
SQL>And if you want absolutely to use regexp, you can issue:
WITH my_data AS
   SELECT 'abc.1.fil' as x FROM dual
    UNION ALL
   SELECT 'def.ol.fil' FROM dual
    UNION ALL
   SELECT 'ghi.ijk.olfil' FROM dual
    UNION ALL
   SELECT 'mno.12.olfil' FROM dual
    UNION ALL
   SELECT 'abc. .fil' as x FROM dual
select trim(regexp_replace(x,'(.fil|.olfil)')) as cleaned
from my_dataHere's the execution of the last query:
SQL> WITH my_data AS
  2  (
  3     SELECT 'abc.1.fil' as x FROM dual
  4      UNION ALL
  5     SELECT 'def.ol.fil' FROM dual
  6      UNION ALL
  7     SELECT 'ghi.ijk.olfil' FROM dual
  8      UNION ALL
  9     SELECT 'mno.12.olfil' FROM dual
10      UNION ALL
11     SELECT 'abc. .fil' as x FROM dual
12  )
13  select trim(regexp_replace(x,'(.fil|.olfil)')) as cleaned
14  from my_data;
CLEANED
abc.1
def.ol
ghi.ijk
mno.12
abc.
SQL>Edited by: Manguilibè KAO on 6 févr. 2012 02:19