rpad oracle

rpad is a powerful string function in Oracle that allows you to pad a string with a certain character to a specified length. It is extremely useful for formatting and aligning data in your SQL queries.

Syntax

The basic syntax of RPAD function is as follows:

RPAD(string, length, [pad_string])

Where:

• string is the input string to be padded.
• length is the total length of the resulting padded string.
• pad_string is optional and specifies the character to use for padding. If omitted, a space character is used.

Example

Let's say you have a table called employees that contains the following data:

| Employee ID | First Name | Last Name | | ----------- | ---------- | --------- | | 101 | John | Doe | | 102 | Jane | Smith | | 103 | Bob | Johnson |

If you want to display the employee IDs right-aligned with a total length of 5 characters, you can use the RPAD function:

SELECT RPAD(employee_id, 5, ' ') AS "Employee ID",
       first_name,
       last_name
FROM employees;

The resulting output would be:

Employee ID | First Name | Last Name
----------- | ---------- | ---------
  101       | John       | Doe
  102       | Jane       | Smith
  103       | Bob        | Johnson

In this example, we used RPAD to pad the employee IDs with spaces so that they are right-aligned with a total length of 5 characters.

Conclusion

RPAD is a handy function for formatting and padding strings in Oracle SQL queries. By specifying the length and pad character, you can easily align your data to make it more readable and presentable.