Skip Headers

Oracle® OLAP DML Reference 10g Release 2 (10.2) Part Number B14346-01 |
Home | Book List | Contents | Index | Master Index | Feedback

Previous | Next
| View PDF

# EXTCHARS

The EXTCHARS function extracts a portion of a text expression.

Tip: When you are using a multibyte character set, you can use the EXTBYTES function instead of the EXTCHARS function.

Return Value

TEXT or NTEXT

Syntax

EXTCHARS(text-expression [start [length]])

Arguments

text-expression

  A `TEXT` or `NTEXT` expression from which a portion is to be extracted. When text-expression is a multiline text value, EXTCHARS preserves the line breaks in the returned value.

start

  An `INTEGER` that represents the character position at which to begin extracting. The position of the first character in text-expression is 1. When you omit this argument, EXTCHARS starts with the first character.

length

  An `INTEGER` that represents the number of characters to be extracted. When length is not specified, or exceeds the number of characters from start to the end of text-expression, the part from start to the end of text-expression is extracted.

Examples

Example 12-6 Extracting Text Characters

This example shows how to extract portions of text from the TEXT value `'hellotherejoe'`.

- The statement

      SHOW EXTCHARS('hellotherejoe', 6, 5)

  produces the following output.

      there

- The statement

      SHOW EXTCHARS('hellotherejoe', 11)

  produces the following output.

      joe