SQL Select on ORACLE

[smsc_1]

Hello all,
Hope I can ask in this room.
I'm driving crazy with the following SQL problem.

I would like to perform a simple select with many fields like:

SQL> select field1,field2,field3,field4, from table;

Since this is only an example (normally I need at least 20 fields), I would like to separate the result with a symbol like .,- (not matter witch symbol).
This because for me will be much simple to export on excell.

Is there a way to separate the result with a symbol?

This is what I have on OpenVMS 8.3.1H1
SQL> sho ver
Current version of SQL is: Oracle Rdb SQL V7.2-100
Underlying versions are:
Database with filename DB_log
Oracle Rdb V7.2-100
Rdb/Dispatch V7.2-100 (OpenVMS IA64)

Regards
Luca

[Duncan Morris]

Hi Luca,

have you tried

select field1 || ',' || field2 || ',' || field3 from table;

Regards,

Duncan

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Under SQLplus you can use SET COLSEP but that's not available in RDB SQL best I can tell.

And while using for example "SET COLSEP ," is a convenient way to quickly generate a CSV file, it is rarely adequate. Notably folks typically want trimmed spaces and double quoted strings to protect against commas within the columns.

So the typical solution often becomes the manual concatenation with a seperator as Duncan outlines.
You may need a PRINT to get a proper header line.

I suppose you could also play with the EDIT_STRING clause on columns in a view to use ',XXXX'. That'd be tedious.


Personally I'd look into postprocessing the standard fixed-column output with a tool like TPU or PERL for format it just the way I'd like it. It is tedious again and worse, it spreads the knowledge of the query and columns across multiple files, so they could get out of sync.
Perl has several module to help read/write CSV files. For example:
http://search.cpan.org/~tilly/Text-xSV-0.21/lib/Text/xSV.pm

fwiw,
Hein.

[smsc_1]

Thanks all,
but if I use:

select field1 || ',' || field2 || ',' || field3 from table;

I got as error:

%SQL-F-UNSNUMXPR, Unsupported numeric expression

What does it mean??

[Wim Van den Wyngaert · Accepted solution]

Try
select field1, "||" , field2 , "||" ...

Wim

[smsc_1]

select field1, "||" , field2 , "||" ...

Is the solution.... Thanks to all!!!

[smsc_1]

Closing Thread and assign points!