Steve,
> I've got a table containing property_id's with values of the form
> ###-####. I would like to discard the slash onwards (and I can't use
> a
> substr() because I am not guaranteed if a) the -#### portion exists,
> b)
> what position it exists from.
>
> If this were a text file, I would use a sed expression such as:
>
> cat textfile | sed 's/-.*$//'
In SQL/plpgsql, you can't do this with a single expression. However,
you can do it with three expressions put together.
CREATE FUNCTION remove_propid_tail (
VARCHAR ) RETURNS VARCHAR AS'
SELECT SUBSTR($1, 1, ((STRPOS($1, ''-'') - 1));
END;'
LANGUAGE 'SQL';
Then run:
UPDATE main_table SET property_id = remove_propid_tail(property_id)
WHERE property_id ~ '-';
-Josh
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