Regular Expression Difficulty

oracleoracle-11gregular expression

I'm trying to extract 456 from the string :123:456: as follows:

select regexp_substr(':123:456:', ':(\d+):', 1, 2, 'i', 1) from dual

However, this query returns null. What am I doing wrong?

Best Answer

This works fine:

select regexp_substr(':123:456:', '(\d+):', 1, 2, 'i', 1) from dual;

I think yours fails because the opening and closing colons won't get matched by both occurrences (because the first match is greedy).

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