I have a string that has this format "number - name" I'm using REGEXP_SUBSTR to split it in two separate columns one for name and one for number.
SELECT
REGEXP_SUBSTR('123 - ABC','[^-]+',1,1) AS NUM,
REGEXP_SUBSTR('123 - ABC','[^-]+',1,2) AS NAME
from dual;
But it doesn't work if the name includes a hyphen for example: ABC-Corp then the name is shown only like 'ABC' instead of 'ABC-Corp'. How can I get a regex exp to ignore everything before the first hypen and include everything after it?
You want to split the string on the first occurence of ' - '. It is a simple enough task to be efficiently performed by string functions rather than regexes:
select
substr(mycol, 1, instr(mycol, ' - ') - 1) num,
substr(mycol, instr(mycol, ' - ') + 3) name
from mytable
with mytable as (
select '123 - ABC' mycol from dual
union all select '123 - ABC - Corp' from dual
)
select
mycol,
substr(mycol, 1, instr(mycol, ' - ') - 1) num,
substr(mycol, instr(mycol, ' - ') + 3) name
from mytable
MYCOL | NUM | NAME :--------------- | :-- | :--------- 123 - ABC | 123 | ABC 123 - ABC - Corp | 123 | ABC - Corp
NB: @GMB solution is much better in your simple case. It's an overkill to use regular expressions for that.
tldr;
Usually it's easierr and more readable to use subexpr parameter instead of occurrence in case of such fixed masks. So you can specify full mask: \d+\s*-\s*\S+
ie numbers, then 0 or more whitespace chars, then -, again 0 or more whitespace chars and 1+ non-whitespace characters.
Then we adding () to specify subexpressions: since we need only numbers and trailing non-whitespace characters we puts them into ():
'(\d+)\s*-\s*(\S+)'
Then we just specify which subexpression we need, 1 or 2:
SELECT
REGEXP_SUBSTR(column_value,'(\d+)\s*-\s*(\S+)',1,1,null,1) AS NUM,
REGEXP_SUBSTR(column_value,'(\d+)\s*-\s*(\S+)',1,1,null,2) AS NAME
from table(sys.odcivarchar2list('123 - ABC', '123 - ABC-Corp'));
Result:
NUM NAME
---------- ----------
123 ABC
123 ABC-Corp
https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/SQLRF/functions164.htm#SQLRF06303
https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/SQLRF/ap_posix003.htm#SQLRF55544
