I want to create an acronym column in a table. I want to be grab the first letter of each word from a 'name' column, capitalize it, then concatenate all into an 'acronym' column.
Any easy way to grab first letters?
Here is an "improved" function, allowing to filter only wanted characters thanks to a regular expression.
initials
does the actual job, you have to specify the regular expressionacronym
does the job keeping Alpha-numeric characters only(Use upper
, lower
or ucase
functions on the output if necessary)
.
delimiter $$
drop function if exists `initials`$$
CREATE FUNCTION `initials`(str text, expr text) RETURNS text CHARSET utf8
begin
declare result text default '';
declare buffer text default '';
declare i int default 1;
if(str is null) then
return null;
end if;
set buffer = trim(str);
while i <= length(buffer) do
if substr(buffer, i, 1) regexp expr then
set result = concat( result, substr( buffer, i, 1 ));
set i = i + 1;
while i <= length( buffer ) and substr(buffer, i, 1) regexp expr do
set i = i + 1;
end while;
while i <= length( buffer ) and substr(buffer, i, 1) not regexp expr do
set i = i + 1;
end while;
else
set i = i + 1;
end if;
end while;
return result;
end$$
drop function if exists `acronym`$$
CREATE FUNCTION `acronym`(str text) RETURNS text CHARSET utf8
begin
declare result text default '';
set result = initials( str, '[[:alnum:]]' );
return result;
end$$
delimiter ;
Example1:
select acronym('Come Again? That Cant Help!');
Outputs:
CATCH
Example2:
select initials('Come Again? That Cant Help!', '[aeiou]');
Outputs:
oeAaaae