Andrew Dunstan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Tom Lane wrote: > >>[EMAIL PROTECTED] (David Fetter) writes: >> >> >>>While PL/Perl is great, it's not available everywhere, and I'd like >>>to be able to grab atoms from a regex match in, say, a SELECT. Is >>>there some way to get access to them? >> >>There's a three-parameter variant of substring() that allows >>extraction of a portion of a regex match --- unfortunately it uses >>SQL99's brain-dead notion of regex, which will not satisfy any Perl >>weenie :-( >> >>I think it'd be worth our while to define some comparable >>functionality that depends only on the POSIX regex engine ... > > substitute should be relatively straightforward, I guess; split and > match maybe less so - what do you return? An array?
That would be great. > Or you could require an explicit subscript to get a particular > return value as in split_part(), which would be potentially > inefficient if you want more than one (although I guess results > could be cached). That'd be good, too. Cheers D -- David Fetter [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://fetter.org/ phone: +1 510 893 6100 cell: +1 415 235 3778 My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular. Adlai Stevenson ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly