How to call REPLACE with CLOB (without exceeding 32K)

Jeffrey Kemp picture Jeffrey Kemp · Apr 17, 2014 · Viewed 39.8k times · Source

Oracle 11g has certainly improved usability of CLOBs, having overloaded most of the string functions so they now work natively with CLOBs.

However, a colleague was getting this error from his code:

ORA-22828: input pattern or replacement parameters exceed 32K size limit
22828. 00000 -  "input pattern or replacement parameters exceed 32K size limit"
*Cause:    Value provided for the pattern or replacement string in the form of
           VARCHAR2 or CLOB for LOB SQL functions exceeded the 32K size limit.
*Action:   Use a shorter pattern or process a long pattern string in multiple
           passes.

This only occurred when the third parameter to replace was a CLOB with more than 32k characters.

(Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production)

Test case:

declare
  v2 varchar2(32767);
  cl_small clob;
  cl_big clob;
  cl_big2 clob;
begin
  v2 := rpad('x', 32767, 'x');
  dbms_output.put_line('v2:' || length(v2));
  cl_small := v2;
  dbms_output.put_line('cl_small:' || length(cl_small));
  cl_big := v2 || 'y' || v2;
  dbms_output.put_line('cl_big[1]:' || length(cl_big));
  cl_big2 := replace(cl_big, 'y', cl_small);
  dbms_output.put_line('cl_big[2]:' || length(cl_big2));
  cl_big2 := replace(cl_big, 'y', cl_big); 
  dbms_output.put_line('cl_big[3]:' || length(cl_big2));
end;
/

Results:

v2:32767
cl_small:32767
cl_big[1]:65535
cl_big[2]:98301
ORA-22828: input pattern or replacement parameters exceed 32K size limit

This seems at odds with the docs which imply that the replacement string may be a CLOB - I would have thought this should imply that any CLOB would be allowed, not just those that happen to be <32K: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e41084/functions153.htm#SQLRF00697

Answer

Jeffrey Kemp picture Jeffrey Kemp · Apr 17, 2014

Here is a rough first draft for a function that will do the job with certain limitations, it hasn't been very well tested yet:

function replace_with_clob
  (i_source in clob
  ,i_search in varchar2
  ,i_replace in clob
  ) return clob is
  l_pos pls_integer;
begin
  l_pos := instr(i_source, i_search);
  if l_pos > 0 then
    return substr(i_source, 1, l_pos-1)
        || i_replace
        || substr(i_source, l_pos+length(i_search));
  end if;
  return i_source;
end replace_with_clob;

It only does a single replace on the first instance of the search term.

declare
  v2 varchar2(32767);
  cl_small clob;
  cl_big clob;
  cl_big2 clob;
begin
  v2 := rpad('x', 32767, 'x');
  dbms_output.put_line('v2:' || length(v2));
  cl_small := v2;
  dbms_output.put_line('cl_small:' || length(cl_small));
  cl_big := v2 || 'y' || v2;
  dbms_output.put_line('cl_big[1]:' || length(cl_big));
  cl_big2 := replace(cl_big, 'y', cl_small);
  dbms_output.put_line('cl_big[2]:' || length(cl_big2));
  cl_big2 := replace_with_clob(cl_big, 'y', cl_big); 
  dbms_output.put_line('cl_big[3]:' || length(cl_big2));
end;
/

v2:32767
cl_small:32767
cl_big[1]:65535
cl_big[2]:98301
cl_big[3]:131069