How to get string after character oracle

Question

I have VP3 - Art & Design and HS5 - Health & Social Care, I need to get string after '-' in Oracle. Can this be achieved using substring?

Answer 1

For a string operation as simple as this, I might just use the base INSTR() and SUBSTR() functions. In the query below, we take the substring of your column beginning at two positions after the hyphen.

SELECT
    SUBSTR(col, INSTR(col, '-') + 2) AS subject
FROM yourTable

We could also use REGEXP_SUBSTR() here (see Gordon's answer), but it would be a bit more complex and the performance might not be as good as the above query.

Answer 2

You can use regexp_substr():

select regexp_substr(col, '[^-]+', 1, 2)

If you want to remove an optional space, then you can use trim():

select trim(leading ' ', regexp_substr(col, '[^-]+', 1, 2))

The non-ovious parameters mean

• 1 -- search from the first character of the source. 1 is the default, but you have to set it anyway to be able to provide the second parameter.
• 2 -- take the second match as the result substring. the default would be 1.