Skip Headers

Oracle® Database SQL Reference 10g Release 2 (10.2) Part Number B14200-02 |
Home | Book List | Contents | Index | Master Index | Feedback

Previous | Next
| View PDF

# LPAD

Syntax

Description of the illustration lpad.gif

Purpose

`LPAD` returns `expr1`, left-padded to length `n` characters with the sequence of characters in `expr2`. This function is useful for formatting the output of a query.

Both `expr1` and `expr2` can be any of the datatypes `CHAR`, `VARCHAR2`, `NCHAR`, `NVARCHAR2`, `CLOB`, or `NCLOB`. The string returned is of `VARCHAR2` datatype if `expr1` is a character datatype and a LOB if `expr1` is a LOB datatype. The string returned is in the same character set as `expr1`. The argument `n` must be a `NUMBER` integer or a value that can be implicitly converted to a `NUMBER` integer.

If you do not specify `expr2`, then the default is a single blank. If `expr1` is longer than `n`, then this function returns the portion of `expr1` that fits in `n`.

The argument `n` is the total length of the return value as it is displayed on your terminal screen. In most character sets, this is also the number of characters in the return value. However, in some multibyte character sets, the display length of a character string can differ from the number of characters in the string.

Examples

The following example left-pads a string with the asterisk (*) and period (.) characters:

    SELECT LPAD('Page 1',15,'*.') "LPAD example"
       FROM DUAL;

    LPAD example
    ---------------
    *.*.*.*.*Page 1