Re: Lpad [message #369162] |
Fri, 31 March 2000 09:30 |
Chris Ruel
Messages: 6 Registered: March 2000
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Junior Member |
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Sylvia,
LPAD is a option you can use when returning data in a SQL query to format your output a little bit.
For example:
select lpad(description,20,'.') description
from test_1
/
will yield:
DESCRIPTION
--------------------
...............Chris
.........CHRISTOPHER
................Lois
..............CARRIE
...........CHRISTIAN
...........Christian
..............Mother
.................Car
.................LOG
..............LOGGER
10 rows selected.
SQL>
To use it, you enclose the column you are selecting from in (). Also, after the column name, you use a comma(,) and then a number. The number signifies how many characters you wish to return from the data. The next option is what you want to "pad" the empty spaces with. I chose a period. It will pad that period on to the LEFT of the output to make the output = 20 characters. You can do the same thing with RPAD but it works off of the right side.
Does that help?
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