Trim between two strings inside a column

Question

Hello,
I have a large data in clob column and string between two values needs to be trimmed to 10 bytes.
ie. - I need to trim string between <Val> and </Val> to 10.
CLOB_COL
<Val>123 Main Street</Val><Addr></Addr><Val>321 Main Street</Val><OtherNode></OtherNode>
And, I would like my result to be:
<Val>123 Main S</Val><Addr></Addr><Val>321 Main S</Val><OtherNode></OtherNode>
What will be the fastest way to update this clob column or probably insert into a new table. (I do not have XML DB installted on this database, so I cannot use XML parser)
Thanks

Answer 1

Hi,
Sorry, I made a mistake.
Try this:
SELECT  REGEXP_REPLACE ( '<Val>2010-10-31 16:59:24</Val>'
                        , '(<Val>[^<]{1,3000})'    || -- \1 = <Val> and up to 3000 characters (not <)
                             '[^<]*'               || -- 0 or more characters (not <) to be removed
                 '(\</Val>)'               -- \2 = </Val>
                        , '\1\2'
                        )     AS val_substring
FROM    dual;A plus-sign in a pattern means the preceding is repeated 1 or more times.
I meant to use an asterisk to mean 0 or more times on this row:
...                          '[^<]*'               || -- 0 or more characters (not <) to be removed
--                     +  was here originally 
By the way, you may have noticed that this site normally doesn't display multiple spaces in a row.
Whenever you post formatted text (including, but not limited to, code) on this site, type these 6 characters:
\(small letters only, inside curly brackets) before and after each section of formatted text, to preserve spacing.
This is especially helpful with regular expressions, not only because they're confusing enough with formatting, but because they use brackets which this site may interpret as markup and not print correctly.