Oracle REGEXP_LIKE Strange Behavior - oracle11g

Question

Have a simple query it's failing for one set of parameters but it works for other parameters it's not working.
This works:
SELECT R.*
FROM ROUTEUSER.AHC_B2B_ROUTE R
WHERE R.PRODUCER = 'Encounters'
AND REGEXP_LIKE ('tplmcoce.41.20170822.txt', R.FILEMASK, 'i')
This is not working
SELECT R.*
FROM ROUTEUSER.AHC_B2B_ROUTE R
WHERE R.PRODUCER = 'Facets'
AND REGEXP_LIKE ('SMS-0162628062', R.FILEMASK, 'i')
If I have a column called Filemask (REGEX Pattern) in database so how can I select matching pattern for given string (file name)?
When I try the second query I am getting the following exception:
ORA-12725: unmatched parentheses in regular expression 12725. 00000 - "unmatched
parentheses in regular expression"
*Cause: The regular expression did not have balanced parentheses.
*Action: Ensure the parentheses are correctly balanced.

Answer 1

SELECT R.*
FROM ROUTEUSER.AHC_B2B_ROUTE R
WHERE R.PRODUCER = 'Facets'
AND REGEXP_LIKE ('^SMS[-]0162628062$*', R.FILEMASK, 'i') ---- Try and let us know output......................

Answer 2

Here is a thought...
select *
from <your_table>
where regexp_count( FILEMASK, '\(' ) != regexp_count( FILEMASK, '\)' )
;
You should find at least one where PRODUCER = 'Facets' (and perhaps more?)
... although this may not be enough. Consider this regexp: '\(abc)' (where you meant '\(abc\)'). You want literal parentheses around the string abc. But you only escaped the opening parenthesis and forgot to escape the closing one. For a regular expression, that is an error: the escaped parenthesis is treated as any other character, it is not "special" in any way; this leaves the closing parenthesis as a special character, and it is not matched by an opening one.
On the other hand, my solution above is not able to distinguish between escaped and non-escaped parentheses - it treats them all the same, so '\(abc)' looks perfectly fine to it. If what I posted above is not enough, you/we will need more subtle ideas. Perhaps:
...
where regexp_count( FILEMASK, '([^\]|^)\(' ) != regexp_count( FILEMASK, '([^\]|^)\)'
This only looks for non-escaped parentheses. [^\] means "any character other than a backslash", and ([^\]|^) means either that or the beginning of the string.

Answer 3

This issue is resolved. This is because I had one bad regular expression (missed one parenthesis) which caused the failure. The REGEX_LIKE started comparing each mask in table column when it come to the bad regex it failed.
Please close this question.
Thanks all.

Answer 4

Escape the Chars in the [] with '\' . And you have to replace the last char '.' with * in the second pattern('SMS...')
^tplmcoce[\.](37|41|47|57)[\.].*[\.]txt$
and
^SMS[\-]0162628062$*
SELECT 1 Matched
FROM DUAL
WHERE REGEXP_LIKE ('tplmcoce.41.20170822.txt',
'^tplmcoce[\.](37|41|47|57)[\.].*[\.]txt$', 'i');
SELECT 1 Matched
FROM DUAL
WHERE REGEXP_LIKE ('SMS-0162628062', '^SMS[\-]0162628062$*', 'i')