2-8. Formatting Query Results
Problem
Your boss asks you to print the results from a couple of queries in a nicely formatted manner.
Solution
Use a combination of different built-in formatting functions along with the concatenation operator (||) to create a nice-looking basic report. The RPAD and LPAD functions along with the concatenation operator are used together in the following example that displays a list of employees from a company:
DECLARE
CURSOR emp_cur IS
SELECT first_name, last_name, phone_number
FROM employees;
emp_rec employees%ROWTYPE;
BEGIN
FOR emp_rec IN emp_cur LOOP
IF emp_rec.phone_number IS NOT NULL THEN
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(RPAD(emp_rec.first_name || ' ' || emp_rec.last_name, 35,'.') || emp_rec.phone_number); ...Get Oracle and PL/SQL Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
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