Replace multiple characters to single character

Question

Hi friends,
I would like to replace multiple characters in a string to a single character. The character may be a pipe (|) or a tilde (~).
For example "|||asdf||123|xyz||" should be changed to "asdf|123|xyz".
I use Oracle 11g2.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Without regexp
with testdata as (
    select '||asdf||||123|xyz|' str from dual union all
    select 'asdf|123|||||||xyz||||' from dual union all
    select '||||||asdf|||123||||||xyz||||||' from dual
select
trim (both '|' from
    replace (
        replace (
            replace (str,'|','|'||chr(0))
            ,chr(0)||'|'
        ,chr(0)
) str
from testdata
STR
"asdf|123|xyz"
"asdf|123|xyz"
"asdf|123|xyz"
with regexp
with testdata as (
    select '||asdf||||123|xyz|' str from dual union all
    select 'asdf|123|||||||xyz||||' from dual union all
    select '||||||asdf|||123||||||xyz||||||' from dual
select
trim (both '|' from
    regexp_replace (
        str
        ,'\|+'
        ,'|'
) str
from testdata
STR
"asdf|123|xyz"
"asdf|123|xyz"
"asdf|123|xyz"
Message was edited by: chris227 regexp added