Oracle PL/SQL Split Function Boosts WHERE IN Clause Usability

Big thanks to Tech Republic for an article about creating a SPLIT user-defined function that accepts a delimited string and creates a table with N rows of data:

function Split
(
    p_list varchar2,
    p_del varchar2 := ','
) return split_tbl pipelined
is
    l_idx    pls_integer;
    l_list    varchar2(32767) := p_list;
    l_value    varchar2(32767);
begin
    loop
        l_idx := instr(l_list,p_del);
        if l_idx > 0 then
            pipe row(substr(l_list,1,l_idx-1));
            l_list := substr(l_list,l_idx+length(p_del));
        else
            pipe row(l_list);
            exit;
        end if;
    end loop;
    return;
end split;

 

And here’s how I used it to perform a “dynamic” query passing in a list of values:

select * 
from myTable
where IN_VARCHAR_LIST IS NULL OR 
    APP.AGENCY_ID IN(
        select column_value 
        from table(Split(IN_VARCHAR_LIST)))