Regular expression to find all table names in a query

Question

I am not that hot at regular expressions and it has made my little mind melt some what.

I am trying to find all the tables names in a query. So say I have the query

Answer 1

RegEx isn't very good at this, as it's a lot more complicated than it appears:

• What if they use LEFT/RIGHT INNER/OUTER/CROSS/MERGE/NATURAL joins instead of the a,b syntax? The a,b syntax should be avoided anyway.
• What about nested queries?
• What if there is no table (selecting a constant)
• What about line breaks and other whitespace formatting?
• Alias names?

I could go on.

What you can do is look for an sql parser, and run your query through that.