Use TRANSLATE to convert the characters you don't want to whitespace and then use REPLACE to remove the whitespace.
1 select 'the 9 cats', replace(translate('the 9 cats', '0123456789', ' '), ' ')
2* from dual
SQL> /
'THE9CATS' REPLACE ---------- ------- the 9 cats thecats
-- Daniel W. Fink http://www.optimaldba.com
IOUG-A Live! April 27 - May 1, 2003 Orlando, FL Sunday, April 27 8:30am - 4:30pm - Problem Solving with Oracle 9i SQL Wednesday, May 1 1:00pm - 2:00pm - Automatic Undo Internals
Mark Richard wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I have a common problem and whilst I can remember solving it in the past I'm drawing a mental blank this time...
I need to look for duplicates in a varchar2 field in a table. However I should ignore case, whitespace and non-alphanumeric characters. Obviously upper, rtrim and ltrim get me a long way to the solution, but... What is the easiest way to remove inline space, so that "the cat" equals "thecat". I thought I used the translate function, but a quick inspection didn't reveal how.
Thanks in advance, Mark.
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