Total Beginner Question..or two

Hello:
I have a question about PL/SQL, and also setting up JDeveloper 9.0.3

I know i have been reading the PL/SQL 101 Books From Oracle Press and I purchased the Oracle 8i Web Developent book, However I cannot seem to find how to do a Phone Number for the Project I am Playing with.
Example a 18005551212 I want to do 1 (800) 555-1212 would I have to do a substruct? how do you do a substruct? (It is not in the book) :)


how does one do that?


Question 2 Since My Setup at home Does not have the power to Run Orale 9ias i am Running Oracle 8.1.7 Rev 3 . Can I Use Jdev 9.0.3 with the JDBC thin Client With the Oracle 8.1.7 Rev 3 Enterprise? If so the how can i do that?

If only Oracle had a mask like Access. Perhaps you could write a function that started from the right and grabbed 4 digits, and then grabbed the next 3 and inserted a hyphon between the two, and then if there are another three digits enclose in () and if there is a 1 place it in the front. You could even add in logic that says if there isn't an area code then it would become the default area code. you can also look into a third party tool to clean up and format the data.

One such tool is made by a company called 1st Logic. I'm sure there are others.

You can use the substr function in oracle and build upon it. You can either make your own function, your build a select statement directly,
viz : select '('||substr(phone, 2,4)||')' from phone_table;

Once again Thank you Raminder Just thought I would post what I did to the code that Raminder explained to me for a simple table called contacts

create table contacts (
First_Name varchar2 (15),
Last_Name varchar2 (15),
Phone varchar2 (10));

insert into contact values
('John', 'Doe', '1234567890');

then to view them i did this


select '('||substr(phone, 1,3)||')' "AREA",
''||substr(phone, 4,3)||'-'||substr(phone, 7,4)||'' "PHONE" from contact;

And it works great in the PL/SQL viewer that I did the code into. I know lots of people are wanting to know this so here it is.


Just making my first contribution in this forum.