Working with strings

Question

Hi All
I have a column with records like this:
a-b-c-d
1-2-3-4
x-y-z-1I want to print till before the third occurance of '-', i.e:
a-b-c
1-2-3
x-y-zany string function can help me out?

Answer 1

sandipjee wrote:
Or if we can trim out somehow everything after last '-' will be better... :)The solutions so far were for you original requirement of "I want to print till before the third occurance of '-'" If you want to change third occurence to last occurence then this should work:
with a
as (select 'a-b-c-d' str from dual
union all select '1-2-3-4' from dual
union all select 'x-y-z-1' from dual
union all select 'a-b-1' from dual
union all select 'a-b-c-d-1' from dual
)select str
       ,substr(str,1,instr(str,'-',1,3) - 1) "3rd '-'"
       ,substr(str,1,instr(str,'-',-1,1) - 1) "last '-'"
from a;
STR       3rd '-'   last '-'
a-b-c-d   a-b-c     a-b-c
1-2-3-4   1-2-3     1-2-3
x-y-z-1   x-y-z     x-y-z
a-b-1               a-b
a-b-c-d-1 a-b-c     a-b-c-dBen