Regular Expression Difficulty

Question

I'm trying to extract 456 from the string :123:456: as follows:

select regexp_substr(':123:456:', ':(\d+):', 1, 2, 'i', 1) from dual

However, this query returns null. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

This works fine:

select regexp_substr(':123:456:', '(\d+):', 1, 2, 'i', 1) from dual;

I think yours fails because the opening and closing colons won't get matched by both occurrences (because the first match is greedy).