POSITION: Returning the First Position of a Substring in a Source String

How to:

The POSITION function returns the first position (in characters) of a substring in a source string.

Top of page
x
Syntax: How to Return the First Position of a Substring in a Source String
POSITION(pattern, source_string)

where:

pattern

Alphanumeric

Is the substring whose position you want to locate. The string can be as short as a single character, including a single blank.

source_string

Alphanumeric

Is the string in which to find the pattern.

The data type of the returned value is Integer.
Example: Returning the First Position of a Substring

In the following request against the EMPLOYEE data source, POSITION determines the position of the first capital letter I in LAST_NAME and stores the result in I_IN_NAME:

TABLE FILE EMPLOYEE
PRINT LAST_NAME AND COMPUTE
I_IN_NAME/I2 = POSITION('I', LAST_NAME);
ON TABLE SET PAGE NOPAGE
END

The output is:

  LAST_NAME        I_IN_NAME                     
  ---------        ---------                           
  STEVENS                  0
  SMITH                    3
  JONES                    0
  SMITH                    3
  BANNING                  5
  IRVING                   1
  ROMANS                   0
  MCCOY                    0
  BLACKWOOD                0
  MCKNIGHT                 5
  GREENSPAN                0
  CROSS                    0
WebFOCUS