View Letter



	Provide a program to parse a delimited string. (details)
	Dear Bryn, I love PL/SQL and look forward to using it for many years to come. My love does not extend, however, to the fact that I have to write my own string parsing programs. That is really not a great use of my time. So I hope that as soon as possible you can add to PL/SQL a program that parses delimited strings and returns the individual elements to a collection. Thanks so much!

The problem... Isn't it exceedingly odd that Oracle PL/SQL does not provide a program that parses a delimited string into its individual elements? Personally, I am tired of writing such programs. Beyond that, a version provided by Oracle would undoubtedly run much faster than my own implementation.
What would like to see... Provide a set of overloaded programs, perhaps in their own UTL_STRINGS package, that allows the user to provide the string, the delimiter and the container (a collection) to hold the returned items.

Steven Feuerstein, PL/SQL Evangelist, Quest Software: "Help me help Oracle improve the PL/SQL language!"

Bryn Llewellyn: "We love to hear from PL/SQL developers. Let us know what is important to you!"