Oracle Regular Expressions Pocket Reference

Name

REGEXP_LIKE — Determines whether a given pattern exists

Synopsis

REGEXP_LIKE is a Boolean function, or predicate, which returns true if a string contains text matching a specified regular expression. Otherwise REGEXP_LIKE returns false.

Syntax

REGEXP_LIKE (source_string, pattern 
            [, match_parameter])

Parameters

source_string

The string you want to search.

pattern

A regular expression describing the text pattern you are searching for. This expression may not exceed 512 bytes in length.

match_parameter

A set of options in the form of a character string that change the default manner in which regular expression pattern matching is performed. You may specify any, all, or none of the following options, in any order:

'i'

Specifies case-insensitive matching.

'c'

Specifies case-sensitive matching.

Note

The NLS_SORT parameter setting determines whether case-sensitive or -insensitive matching is done by default.

'n'

Allows the period (.) to match the newline character. Normally, that is not the case.

'm'

Causes the caret (^) and dollar sign ($) to match the beginning and ending, respectively, of lines within the source string. Normally, the caret (^) and dollar sign ($) match only the very beginning and very ending of the source string, regardless of any newline characters within the string.

Examples

In a SQL statement, REGEXP_LIKE may be used only as a predicate in the WHERE and HAVING clauses. This is because SQL does not recognize the Boolean data type. For example:

SELECT 'Phone number present' FROM DUAL ...