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

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

Syntax: How to Return the First Position of a Substring in a Source String

POSITION(pattern, 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.

string

Alphanumeric

Is the string in which to find the pattern.

The data type of the returned value is Integer.

POSITION determines the position of the first capital letter I in LAST_NAME.

POSITION('I', LAST_NAME)

For STEVENS, the result is 0.

For SMITH, the result is 3.