Remove spaces from a field

Question

i have a field in a table that stores the email address; this field is manually populated, so almost anything can be put into it; the field is 100 characters long;
one one particular record, someone entered:
"[email protected] [email protected]" into the email address; yes, that is the email address, some spaces and then the email address again;
i have a select statement that gets the first 50 characters of the email address -- "select substr(email_addr,1,50) from employee;"
so what i'm getting is "[email protected] johnathan.washingto", when all i want is "[email protected]";
So what function or trick can i use to get all characters in the email address up to but not including the first space? I thought translate or decode could do it, but i haven't figured it out yet.

Answer 1

This forum is for using the "SQL Developer" tool rather than general SQL questions (which is what the "SQL and PL/SQL" forum is for). However, to get what you want, try:
select decode(instr(email_addr, ' '), 0, email_addr, substr(email_addr, 1, instr(email_addr, ' ') - 1)) from employee;
This should work for both where there is a space and where there isn't a space.
theFurryOne