Celebrate Batman Day with SQL

Because today is Batman Day, it calls for a celebration of the SQL type:

SQL> select listagg (b)
  2        within group (order by null) ||' Batman'
  3    from (select 0f/0 b
  4        from dual
  5      connect by level <= 14
  6      );

LISTAGG(B)WITHINGROUP(ORDERBYNULL)||'BATMAN'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NanNanNanNanNanNanNanNanNanNanNanNanNanNan Batman

RegExp: Constraint to prevent spaces at the beginning or end.

Even though a space is a regular character, the client didn't want spaces at the beginning or end of a string. Any spaces in the middle were fine.
Of course this could be handled by the application, but it must also be implemented in the database. Using a check constraint with a regular expression will prevent the end user from entering unwanted data.

To try things out, let's just start with a simple table with a single column.

   create table test
   (str varchar2(10));

Now the magic part: add a check constraint using a regular expression

   alter table test
   add constraint str_chk check (
      regexp_like (str, '^[^[:space:]].+[^[:space:]]$')
    );

The regular expression reads: The string should start (the first caret) with any character which is not in the character class of [:space:], followed by one or more characters (the period) and it should end with (the dollar) any character as long as it's not in the character class of [:space:].

UPDATE - 07-Sept-2016

The expression that is used in the above constraint will also prevent from a single allowed character or double character to be entered. This omission has been corrected by David Grimberg. The correct regular expression should be:

^[^[:space:]](.*[^[:space:]])?$

To test the constraint, the following insert statement were used.

   insert into test values ('hello');
   insert into test values ('hel lo');
   -- Not allowed:
   --   starting with a space
   insert into test values (' hello');
   --   ending with a space
   insert into test values ('hello ');
   --   just a space
   insert into test values (' ');
   --   multiple spaces
   insert into test values ('   ');
   --   Tab
   insert into test values (chr(9));
   --   Line feed
   insert into test values (chr(10));
   --   Carrige Return
   insert into test values (chr(13));