Oracle SQL Pad Left Zeros

In Oracle SQL, you may need to pad leading zeros to a value so that it has a fixed length. This is often required when dealing with numerical identifiers such as customer or account numbers. Oracle provides a function called LPAD that can be used to pad a string with leading characters.

Syntax of LPAD function

LPAD(string, length, pad_string)

• string: The string to be padded.
• length: The total length of the resulting string.
• pad_string: The character(s) to be used as padding. This is an optional argument and defaults to a space character if not specified.

Example

Suppose you have an account number that is stored as a string and you want to pad it with leading zeros so that it has a length of 10 characters. You can use the LPAD function as follows:

SELECT LPAD('1234', 10, '0') AS padded_account_number FROM dual;

This will return the following result:

PADDED_ACCOUNT_NUMBER
0000001234

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have seen how to use the LPAD function in Oracle SQL to pad a string with leading characters. This is a helpful function that can be useful in a variety of situations.