RE Gurus: I have a situation where I need to extract a couple pieces of information from a string. The string, if entered perfectly by the user, would look someting like this: DUN: 006235835 SID: KT-3616* I need to extract the 006235835 into one variable and the KT-3616 into another. Both "numbers" can possibly be something other than numbers alone as in the SID: part of the string above. I have come up with a way of extracting both pieces of information where, at least in my mind, the key parameters are the colon (:) and a space, as in the first case, or asterik (*), as in the second case, marking the end of the string to extract. This one extracts the first value: rnd=# select substring ('DUN: 006235835 SID: KT-3616*' from '^.+?:(.+?) '); substring ------------ 0062358 (1 row) This one extracts the second value; rnd=# select substring ('DUN: 006235835 SID: KT-3616*' from '^.+?:.+?:(.+?)\\*'); substring ----------- KT-3616 (1 row) I keep thinking there is a better way to do this. It has taken me several hours just to get to this point. So, I would love to see any suggestions as to improvments on this. I just know it could be better implemented. rnd=# select version(); version -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PostgreSQL 7.4.6 on i686-redhat-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC) 3.2.3 20030502 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.3-49) (1 row) Thanks for the input...