Reverse String Word by Word using SQL

Question

I would need to reverse the word positions in a sentence or String.

For example : "Hello World! I Love StackOverflow", to be displayed as "StackOverflow Love I World! Hello". 

Can it be done with a SQL ? The word length is no greater than VARCHAR2(4000) which is the maximum length support in a Oracle VARCHAR2 table column.

I got solutions for reversing a string (Characters in reverse order) only

Answer 1

XML-based version to avoid defining your own function; requires 11g for listagg():

select listagg(word, ' ') within group (order by rn desc) as reversed
from (
  select word, rownum as rn
  from xmltable('for $i in ora:tokenize($STR, " ") return $i'
    passing 'Hello World! I Love StackOverflow' as str
    columns word varchar2(4000) path '.'
  )
);

REVERSED                               
----------------------------------------
StackOverflow Love I World! Hello        

The XMLTable() does the tokenising, and assigns a row number:

select rownum as rn, word
from xmltable('for $i in ora:tokenize($STR, " ") return $i'
  passing 'Hello World! I Love StackOverflow' as str
  columns word varchar2(4000) path '.'
);

        RN WORD               
---------- --------------------
         1 Hello                
         2 World!               
         3 I                    
         4 Love                 
         5 StackOverflow        

The listagg() then pieces it back together in reverse order.

Answer 2

Create a Function:

REGEXP_SUBSTR('Your text here','[^ ]+', 1, ?) will extract a word from the text using Space as a delimiter. Tt returns the original String itself on Exception!

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION reverse_words (v_STRING IN VARCHAR2)
RETURN VARCHAR2
IS
   L_TEMP_TEXT  VARCHAR2(4000);
   L_FINAL_TEXT  VARCHAR2(4000);
   V_LOOPCOUNT NUMBER :=0;
   T_WORD VARCHAR2(4000);
BEGIN
      L_TEMP_TEXT := regexp_replace(V_STRING,'[[:space:]]+',' '); -- Replace multiple spaces as single
      LOOP
        v_LOOPCOUNT := v_LOOPCOUNT+1;
        T_WORD      := REGEXP_SUBSTR(L_TEMP_TEXT,'[^ ]+', 1, V_LOOPCOUNT);
        L_final_TEXT := T_WORD||' '||L_final_TEXT;
      EXIT WHEN T_WORD IS NULL;
      END LOOP;
   RETURN(TRIM(L_final_TEXT));
EXCEPTION
    WHEN OTHERS THEN
        DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(sqlerrm||chr(10)||dbms_utility.format_error_backtrace);
        RETURN V_STRING;
END reverse_words;
/

Sample Result:

You can call reverse_words(yourcolumn) from your_table

SQL> select reverse_words('Hello World! I Love StackOverflow') "Reversed" from dual;

Reversed
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
StackOverflow Love I World! Hello