Oracle® Database SQL Reference 10g Release 2 (10.2) Part Number B14200-01 |
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Syntax
Purpose
LPAD
returns expr1
, left-padded to length n
characters with the sequence of characters in expr2
. This function is useful for formatting the output of a query.
Both expr1
and expr2
can be any of the datatypes CHAR
, VARCHAR2
, NCHAR
, NVARCHAR2
, CLOB
, or NCLOB
. The string returned is of VARCHAR2
datatype if expr1
is a character datatype and a LOB if expr1
is a LOB datatype. The string returned is in the same character set as expr1
. The argument n
must be a NUMBER
integer or a value that can be implicitly converted to a NUMBER
integer.
If you do not specify expr2
, then the default is a single blank. If expr1
is longer than n
, then this function returns the portion of expr1
that fits in n
.
The argument n
is the total length of the return value as it is displayed on your terminal screen. In most character sets, this is also the number of characters in the return value. However, in some multibyte character sets, the display length of a character string can differ from the number of characters in the string.
Examples
The following example left-pads a string with the asterisk (*) and period (.) characters:
SELECT LPAD('Page 1',15,'*.') "LPAD example" FROM DUAL; LPAD example --------------- *.*.*.*.*Page 1