Programming Praxis

We have a simple exercise today, inspired a co-worker. Where I work, we have a reporting tool that permits a “hook” to the underlying SQL in some places. My co-worker asked me how to write an SQL statement that extracts the first word (a maximal sequence of non-spaces) from the beginning of a string (assume there are no leading spaces). For instance, given the string “abcdefg hijklmnop qrs tuv wxyz” the first word is “abcdefg”. Here’s the SQL expression, wrapped in a select statement, with &&STR representing the string:

select substr('&&STR', 1, instr('&&STR', ' ') - 1) from dual

Your task is to write a program to extract the first word from a string. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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