One of our tables has a few columns that may be interpreted as strings or may be numbers (data type is varchar, numbers are stored as decimal). Generally, operations are performed on the string, but sometimes we need to parse out a number - without it failing on error. I wrote the following function to approximate to the semantics of atoi: create or replace function str2int(val varchar) returns bigint immutable as $$ begin val=substring(val from '[0-9]*'); if length(val) between 1 and 19 then return val::bigint; end if; return 0; end; $$ language plpgsql; It uses a regular expression to chop the string down to just the leading digits (leading only - '123.45' should parse as 123). Is there a more efficient way to achieve this? Thanks! Chris Angelico -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
