How to loop through a delimited list in Oracle PLSQL

Question

I am working on an Oracle procedure that calls another procedure within it. One of my parameters (parm1) can contain one or more values in a comma separated lis

Answer 1

There is a utility procedure COMMA_TO_TABLE and array type DBMS_UTILITY.UNCL_ARRAY dedicated for this task. Since Oracle 10g.

It is well document here.

Here is a sample solution:

SET SERVEROUTPUT ON
DECLARE
    csvListElm VARCHAR2(4000) := 'elm1, elm2,elm3 ,elm4 , elm5';
    csvListTable DBMS_UTILITY.UNCL_ARRAY;
    csvListLen BINARY_INTEGER;
    currTableName VARCHAR2(222);
BEGIN
    DBMS_UTILITY.COMMA_TO_TABLE(csvListElm, csvListLen, csvListTable);
    FOR csvElm IN 1..(csvListTable.COUNT - 1) LOOP
        dbms_output.put_line('-- CSV element        : <'||csvListTable(csvElm)||'>');
        dbms_output.put_line('-- Trimmed CSV element: <'||trim(csvListTable(csvElm))||'>');
    END LOOP; 
END;
/

Sample output:

-- CSV element        : ;
-- Trimmed CSV element: ;
-- CSV element        : < elm2>;
-- Trimmed CSV element: ;
-- CSV element        : ;
-- Trimmed CSV element: ;
-- CSV element        : ;
-- Trimmed CSV element: ;
-- CSV element        : < elm5>;
-- Trimmed CSV element: ;