Oracle/PLSQL: Extract arithmetic operators from a string

Question: I'd like to know how to handle this issue. I have a stored procedure that has an input variable:

v_in varchar2(200);

The value will be something like this:

1+2*30+40

I need to extract only the arithmetic operators (+, *, and +) so that I can use them in a query. How can I do this?

Answer: To extract the arithmetic operators from your varchar2 variable, you will need to use both the translate and replace functions.

For example,

translate('1+2*30+40','01234',' ') would return '+* +'

replace('+* +', ' ') would return '+*+'

So you could combine these functions into:

replace(translate('1+2*30+40','01234',' '), ' ') would return '+*+'

Learn more about the translate function.

Learn more about the replace function.