I can remember many years ago having a conversation with a non-AS400 (yes, it was that long ago) person about the programming environment we worked with. He scoffed at the AS400 stating he could never work on it as it did not support Regular Expressions. I am not going to describe in too much detail what Regular Expressions, sometimes called regex or regexp, are as others have done a good job doing that. To give a very simple explanation: it is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern, which is then used to find or find and replace parts of strings. If you are interested in learning more check the Wikipedia page about regular expressions here.

Within the Db2 for i PTFs that accompanied IBM i TR 2 and 7.2 TR 6 a number of regular expressions functions were introduced to SQL. I am not going to describe them all in one post, as it would be too long, as I feel they merit their own posts. To start this post is about the REGEXP_LIKE . I am just going to give a simple overview of how to use this, if you want more details or want to learn how to make complex statements I suggest you visit the page on IBM's KnowledgeCenter, link at the bottom of this post, or use your favorite search engine to search for " REGEXP_LIKE ". The posts about REGEXP_LIKE for Oracle's PL/SQL I found helpful.

For these examples I built a Db2 table to contain the data I will be using:

01 CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE MYLIB.PERSON ( 02 PERSON_ID FOR "PID" INTEGER 03 GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY 04 (START WITH 1, INCREMENT BY 1, NOCYCLE), 05 FIRST_NAME FOR "FNAME" VARCHAR(20), 06 LAST_NAME FOR "LNAME" VARCHAR(30) 07 ) ; 08 LABEL ON COLUMN PERSON ( 09 PERSON_ID IS 'Person id', 10 FIRST_NAME IS 'First name', 11 LAST_NAME IS 'Last name' 12 ) ;

Line 1: As of IBM i 7.2 I can use CREATE OR REPLACE to define my table. If I change the definition of the table I can run this statement again and it will change the table to match the new definition, and map the contents of the table to the new definition.

Lines 2 – 4: I am defining an identity column to help keep the rows unique. For more details on its definition refer to the post about Temporal tables. Personally, I think the definition is self explanatory.

Lines 5 and 6: I have defined two columns for the first and last names of the people to be included in this table.

Lines 8 – 12: I want to give this table decent column headings. These are the equivalent of DDS's COLHDG .

I added rows to the table using the INSERT statement.

INSERT INTO PERSON VALUES(DEFAULT,'ROBERT','ALLEN') ; INSERT INTO PERSON VALUES(DEFAULT,'John','Austin') ; INSERT INTO PERSON VALUES(DEFAULT,'don','bennett') ;

Notice that I used DEFAULT for the value of the first row. As this is the identity column it will increment itself when rows are added, I do not give it value.

The names I have loaded the table with are the names of the Coventry City Football Club squad from the 1961-62 season.

Let me start with the my first Select statement.

SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'Y')

I have given two of the REGEXP-LIKE parameters. The first is the name of the column to perform the test upon. The second is the character(s) to search for. There are others, but I have not used them in this statement. Here I want my result set to include all of the players whose last name has a " Y " in it.

Person First Last id name name 7 ALAN DALEY 19 BILLY MYERSCOUGH

As I entered an upper case " Y " all of the players with that in their last name were returned. But I know I have players with a lower case " y " in the last name too. Fortunately I can use the third parameter to ignore the case.

SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'Y','i')

By using a lower case 'i' as the third parameter the results will return all of the last names that contain a "Y", regardless of case. The " i " must be lower case, an upper case version will give you an error. As this is a utility taken from Unix it is case sensitive.

Person First Last id name name 7 ALAN DALEY 9 lol harvey 19 BILLY MYERSCOUGH 21 reg ryan

I could make my search string be more than one character if I so desire.

In this next I want to find all of the rows where the last name contains a "Y" or "Z", regardless of case. I use the pipe ( | ) symbol to indicate that I want an "or".

SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'y|z','i')

The names returned are shown below. Frank is the only player with a "Z" in his name.

Person First Last id name name 7 ALAN DALEY 9 lol harvey 17 Frank Kletzenbauer 19 BILLY MYERSCOUGH 21 reg ryan

If I wanted to test for any three characters in a name I could use the pipe, but if there were more than three it would look unwieldy. I can use the square brackets ( [ ] ) and place the values I want to search for within, think of it like a list of characters.

SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'f|y|z','i') SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'[fyz]','i')

Now I have Ron Framer added to the results.

Person First Last id name name 7 ALAN DALEY 8 Ron Framer 9 lol harvey 17 Frank Kletzenbauer 19 BILLY MYERSCOUGH 21 reg ryan

I can also use a hyphen ( - ) for a range of values within the square brackets. With this statement I want all of the players whose last name contains a letter between "I" and "K".

SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'[i-k]','i')

This gives me a long list of players.

Person First Last id name name 2 John Austin 4 DIETMAR BRUCK 5 Brian Caine 6 george curtis 10 RON HEWITT 11 Brian Hill 12 peter hill 14 Stuart Imlach 15 eric jones 16 MICK KEARNS 17 Frank Kletzenbauer 18 arthur lightening 20 Brian Nicholas 23 Nelson Stiffle

I can give two ranges to only return those players whose names contain a letter from "I" – "K" followed by a letter in the range "A" – "E".

SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'[i-k][a-e]','i')

The results are much smaller. "KEARNS" is returned as it has a "K" followed by an "E". "Nicholas" as the "i" is followed by "c".

Person First Last id name name 16 MICK KEARNS 20 Brian Nicholas

If I want to check the variable I am testing starts with a letter I use the caret ( ^ ) symbol.

SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'^b','i')

Which will give me.

Person First Last id name name 3 don bennett 4 DIETMAR BRUCK

The dollar ( $ ) character is used to indicate that I want to look for the last character in the variable.

SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'t$|r$','i')

I used the or ( | ) I get all of players whose name ends in "T" or "R".

Person First Last id name name 3 don bennett 8 Ron Framer 10 RON HEWITT 13 COLIN HOLDER 17 Frank Kletzenbauer

I can also search for patterns. For example a vowel, followed by any character, and then another vowel. To indicate the "any character" I use a period/full stop ( . ).

SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'[aeiou].[aeiou]','i')

Which returns the following.

Person First Last id name name 5 Brian Caine 7 ALAN DALEY 8 Ron Framer 10 RON HEWITT 15 eric jones 17 Frank Kletzenbauer 18 arthur lightening 20 Brian Nicholas

And I just add another period/full stop if I want a list of all the players with vowels separated by two characters.

SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'[aeiou]..[aeiou]','i')

Which gives me.

Person First Last id name name 1 ROBERT ALLEN 2 John Austin 3 don bennett 5 Brian Caine 6 george curtis 9 lol harvey 13 COLIN HOLDER 14 Stuart Imlach 17 Frank Kletzenbauer 20 Brian Nicholas 25 BOB WESSON

In this last example I want to list all of the players who have two "T" in their last name. I could have "tt" in my search patter, but there is another way. If I put the character(s) I want to search for in square brackets and the number of occurrences in curly brackets ( { } ).

SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(LNAME,'[t]{2}','i')

Only two players have "TT" in their last names.

Person First Last id name name 3 don bennett 10 RON HEWITT

There is a lot more you can do with the REGEXP_LIKE , this is just intended as a quick introduction. For more of what you can do with it click on the link below to the KnowledgeCenter page, below. Thankfully this is POSIX compliant, therefore, examples from other SQL databases that are also POSIX compliant can be used.

Other Db2 for i regular expressions:

You can learn more about the REGEXP_LIKE command from the IBM website here.

This article was written for IBM i 7.3 TR2 and 7.2 TR6.