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Databases Reporting with SQL Working with Text Practice Session

Can you combine a Substring and Replace function inside one another?

--- From the actors, truncate names greater than 10 character with ... e.g. William Wo...

What I want to do only add the "..." IF the string exceeds 10 characters. Is this possible? I have this as my starting point:

SELECT SUBSTR(name, 1, 10) || "..." FROM actors

However, I noticed for names of 10 or less letters I still get the "..." added afterwards. I'd like to conditionally avoid that if possible...

2 Answers

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,184 Points

This would be a good place for a CASE statement.

Has the course covered the use of CASE yet? You could use it in something like this:

SELECT CASE WHEN LENGTH(name) > 10
            THEN SUBSTR(name, 1, 10) || "..."
            ELSE name
       END AS truncated_name
FROM actors

What does the:

END AS truncated_name

do?

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,184 Points

Every CASE statement must have an "END". These two keywords act as the "bookends" of the conditional.

Then the "AS truncated_name" applies an alias to the conditional column, so it will be displayed as "truncated_name". Without an alias, the column's name would be the entire CASE statement (rather ugly!).

To avoid having '...' with names that are under than 10 of length, I did the following:

SELECT id, name, SUBSTR(name, 1, 10) || '...' AS too_long FROM actors WHERE LENGTH(name) > 10;

I am sure there are other ways around it but this is how i I did it. I hope this helps. let me know if you have questions.