From: manchicken <manchicken@notsosoft.net>
Organization: notsosoft.net
To: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: yet another simple SQL question
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 12:59:34 -0500
User-Agent: KMail/1.9.7
References: <467FFEF9.5050603@joshuaneil.com>
In-Reply-To: <467FFEF9.5050603@joshuaneil.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
  charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Message-Id: <200706251259.35273.manchicken@notsosoft.net>

On Monday 25 June 2007 12:44:25 Joshua wrote:
> Ok,
>
> You guys must be getting sick of these newbie questions, but I can't
> resist since I am learning a lot from these email lists and getting
> results quick! Thanks to everyone for their contributions.
>
> Here is my questions....
>
> I have a column that looks like this
>
> firstname
> -----------------
> John B
> Mark A
> Jennifer D
>
> Basically I have the first name followed by a middle initial. Is there a
> quick command I can run to strip the middle initial? Basically, I just
> need to delete the middle initial so the column would then look like the
> following:
>
> firstname
> ---------------
> John
> Mark
> Jennifer
>
> Thanks again for all of your help today. Everything you guys have been
> sending has produced successful results.
>
> Thanks.
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ?
>
>                http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq

Well, the simple way I could think of to do this would to be a simple regex 
(the query mock-up below is untested)...

select regexp_replace(COLUMN, '(.*)\\s\\w$', '\\1', 'g') ...

This doesn't seem like a difficult thing to do in application code.  It seems 
like it makes more sense to do it there.

-- 
~ manchicken <><
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)nfluence with large hammer.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0


Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html