Casting hexadecimal to int

I was looking for a way to cast hex numbers (stored in a varchar column)
to int. I found many people asking the same thing, but no answers.

It seems that this is supported by the following syntax

select x'1f'::int;

Since this doesn't work with variable values, I wrote this following
function. Perhaps it will help anyone wanting to do the same thing.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION hex_to_int(varchar) RETURNS integer AS '
DECLARE
   h alias for $1;
   exec varchar;
   curs refcursor;
   res  int;
BEGIN
  exec := ''SELECT x'''''' || h || ''''''::int'';
  OPEN curs FOR EXECUTE exec;
  FETCH curs INTO res;
  CLOSE curs;
  return res;
END;'
LANGUAGE 'plpgsql'
IMMUTABLE
STRICT;

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Richard van den Berg, CISSP

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