Metadata Manager Custom Metadata Integration Guide

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substr Function

Returns a portion of a string. substr counts all characters, including blanks, starting at the beginning of the string.

The function name is case sensitive.

substr( string, start [,length] )

The following table describes the substr arguments:

Argument	Required/Optional	Description
string	Required	Must be a character string. You can enter an expression. Passes the strings you want to search. If you pass a numeric value, the function converts it to a character string.
start	Required	Must be an integer. The position in the string where you want to start counting. You can enter an expression. If the start position is a positive number, substr locates the start position by counting from the beginning of the string. If the start position is a negative number, substr locates the start position by counting from the end of the string. If the start position is 0, substr searches from the first character in the string.
length	Optional	Must be an integer greater than 0. The number of characters you want substr to return. You can enter an expression. If you omit the length argument, substr returns all of the characters from the start position to the end of the string. If you pass a negative integer or 0, the function returns an empty string. If you pass a decimal, the function rounds it to the nearest integer value.

String.

Empty string if you pass a negative or 0 length value.

NULL if a value passed to the function is NULL.

The following expressions return the phone number without the area code for each row in the PHONE column:

substr( PHONE, 5, 8 )