On Monday 25 June 2007 12:44:25 Joshua wrote: > Ok, > > You guys must be getting sick of these newbie questions, but I can't > resist since I am learning a lot from these email lists and getting > results quick! Thanks to everyone for their contributions. > > Here is my questions.... > > I have a column that looks like this > > firstname > ----------------- > John B > Mark A > Jennifer D > > Basically I have the first name followed by a middle initial. Is there a > quick command I can run to strip the middle initial? Basically, I just > need to delete the middle initial so the column would then look like the > following: > > firstname > --------------- > John > Mark > Jennifer > > Thanks again for all of your help today. Everything you guys have been > sending has produced successful results. > > Thanks. > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? > > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq
Well, the simple way I could think of to do this would to be a simple regex (the query mock-up below is untested)... select regexp_replace(COLUMN, '(.*)\\s\\w$', '\\1', 'g') ... This doesn't seem like a difficult thing to do in application code. It seems like it makes more sense to do it there. -- ~ manchicken <>< (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)nfluence with large hammer. 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match
