Re: Doing a regexp-based search/replace?

Well, the easiest general way is probably a plperl function, but I think
the following may work for your specific case:

update mytable set
property_id=substr(property_id, 1, position('-' in property_id)-1)
where position('-' in property_id)!=0;

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Steve Frampton wrote:

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> Hello:
>
> I've got a table containing property_id's with values of the form
> ###-####. I would like to discard the slash onwards (and I can't use a
> substr() because I am not guaranteed if a) the -#### portion exists, b)
> what position it exists from.
>
> If this were a text file, I would use a sed expression such as:
>
> cat textfile | sed 's/-.*$//'
>
> I've been looking for a way to do this with PostgreSQL but so far haven't
> found a function that seems to be suitable. I thought maybe I could do it
> with translate, but translate doesn't appear to work with regular
> expressions. So far I've tried things like:
>
> select translate(property_id, '-.*', '') from mytable;
>
> I need to do this, because the -.* portion of my property_id was entered
> in error, and I would like to do an update on the entire table and just
> have the left-hand side of the property_id column remaining.