Re: yet another simple SQL question

[manchicken <manchicken(at)notsosoft(dot)net>]

On Monday 25 June 2007 12:44:25 Joshua wrote:
> Ok,
>
> You guys must be getting sick of these newbie questions, but I can't
> resist since I am learning a lot from these email lists and getting
> results quick! Thanks to everyone for their contributions.
>
> Here is my questions....
>
> I have a column that looks like this
>
> firstname
> -----------------
> John B
> Mark A
> Jennifer D
>
> Basically I have the first name followed by a middle initial. Is there a
> quick command I can run to strip the middle initial? Basically, I just
> need to delete the middle initial so the column would then look like the
> following:
>
> firstname
> ---------------
> John
> Mark
> Jennifer
>
> Thanks again for all of your help today. Everything you guys have been
> sending has produced successful results.
>
> Thanks.
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ?
>
>                http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq

Well, the simple way I could think of to do this would to be a simple regex 
(the query mock-up below is untested)...

select regexp_replace(COLUMN, '(.*)\\s\\w$', '\\1', 'g') ...

This doesn't seem like a difficult thing to do in application code.  It seems 
like it makes more sense to do it there.

-- 
~ manchicken <><
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