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Oracle® Database SQL Reference
10g Release 1 (10.1)

Part Number B10759-01
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SUBSTR


Syntax

substr::=
Description of substr.gif follows
Description of the illustration substr.gif


Purpose

The SUBSTR functions return a portion of string, beginning at character position, substring_length characters long. SUBSTR calculates lengths using characters as defined by the input character set. SUBSTRB uses bytes instead of characters. SUBSTRC uses Unicode complete characters. SUBSTR2 uses UCS2 code points. SUBSTR4 uses UCS4 code points.

string can be any of the datatypes CHAR, VARCHAR2, NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, CLOB, or NCLOB. Both position and substring_length must be of datatype NUMBER, or any datatype that can be implicitly converted to NUMBER, and must resolve to an integer. The return value is the same datatype as string. Floating-point numbers passed as arguments to SUBSTR are automatically converted to integers.


See Also:

Oracle Database Globalization Support Guide for more information about SUBSTR functions and length semantics in different locales


Examples

The following example returns several specified substrings of "ABCDEFG":

SELECT SUBSTR('ABCDEFG',3,4) "Substring"
     FROM DUAL;
 
Substring
---------
CDEF

SELECT SUBSTR('ABCDEFG',-5,4) "Substring"
     FROM DUAL;

Substring
---------
CDEF

Assume a double-byte database character set:

SELECT SUBSTRB('ABCDEFG',5,4.2) "Substring with bytes"
     FROM DUAL;

Substring with bytes
--------------------
CD