CHANGEBYTES

The CHANGEBYTES function changes one or more occurrences of a specified string in a text expression to another string.

Return Value

TEXT

Syntax

CHANGEBYTES(text-expression oldtext newtext [number])

Arguments

text-expression: The expression in which bytes are to be changed. When text-expression is a multiline TEXT value, CHANGEBYTES preserves the line breaks in the returned value.
oldtext: A text expression that contains one or more bytes that will be changed.
newtext: A text expression that contains one or more bytes that will replace oldtext.
number: An INTEGER that represents the number of times oldtext should be replaced with newtext when oldtext appears more than once in text-expression. The default is to change all occurrences of oldtext.

Notes

Single-Byte Characters

When you are using a single-byte character set, you can use CHANGECHARS instead of CHANGEBYTES.

NTEXT Data Type

This function does not accept NTEXT arguments, because it is oriented toward byte-manipulation instead of character manipulation. It always returns values of type TEXT. When you must use this function on NTEXT values, use the CONVERT or TO_CHAR function to convert the NTEXT value to TEXT.

Replacing Bytes in a Text Value

You can use REPLBYTES to replace bytes in a text value beginning at a certain byte.

Examples

Example 8-42 Changing Text Values Using Bytes

This example shows how to change one instance of a portion of a text value.

The statement

SHOW CHANGEBYTES('Hello there, Joe\nHello there, Jane', 
   'there', - 'to you', 1)

produces the following output.

Hello to you, Joe
Hello there, Jane