Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008...5:22 pm
Postgres select replace with regular expression
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Postgres seriously kicks ass, here's a quick way to do a substring based on a regular expression. A Co-worker wanted to get the first word out of a column that contained a sentence. If we were using something lame like oracle we'd have to do gymnastics to do that.
It's a one-liner in postgres.
SELECT substring('this is a sentence' FROM '^(.+?)\\s.+$')
So we're selecting out the group that is a series of characters at the start of a line (column) before a space. Epic win.
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