2010/2/2 Tena Sakai <tsakai@gallo.ucsf.edu>:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I need a bit of help on postgres reqular expression.
> With a table of the following definition:
>
> Table "tsakai.pheno"
> Column | Type | Modifiers
> -----------+-------------------+-----------
> subjectid | integer | not null
> height | character varying | not null
> race | character varying | not null
> blood | character varying | not null
>
> I want to catch entries in height column that includes a
> decimal point. Here's my attempt:
>
> select subjectid, height
> from tsakai.pheno
> where height ~ '[:digit:]+.[:digit:]+';
>
> Which returns 0 rows, but if I get rid of where clause,
> I get rows like:
>
> subjectid | height
> -----------+--------
> 55379 | 70.5
> 55383 | 69
> 55395 | 70
> 56173 | 71
> 56177 | 65.5
> 56178 | 70
> . .
> . .
>
> And when I escape that dot after first plus sign with a backslash,
> like this:
> where height ~ '[:digit:]+\.[:digit:]+';
> then I get complaint:
>
> WARNING: nonstandard use of escape in a string literal
> LINE 3: where height ~ '[:digit:]+\.[:digit:]+';
> ^
> HINT: Use the escape string syntax for escapes, e.g., E'\r\n'.
>
> From there, it was a downward spiral descent...
>
you have to use a prefix 'E' - E'some string with \backslash'
for your case the reg. expr could be
postgres=# select '70.5' ~ e'\\d+\.\\d+';?column?
----------t
(1 row)
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/functions-matching.html
or
postgres=# select '70.5' ~ e'[[:digit:]]+\.[[:digit:]]+';?column?
----------t
(1 row)
Regards
Pavel Stehule
> Please help.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tena Sakai
> tsakai@gallo.ucsf.edu
>
>
>
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