Add a string splitter function to ESQL

Apologies ... having scrolled down further I now see your code from stackoverflow. It looks like you are using the Environment tree to get around the array problem, and were also utilising SUBSTRING with BEFORE as per my suggestion ... Great minds think alike!

RFE Review. Thank you for taking the time to raise this enhancement request and apologies it has been in Submitted status for a while. We agree that having a splitting function would aid usability for writing code, so we like the principle of the suggestion. However, one of the inhibitors to an implementation in this space is that ESQL does not have the concept or syntax structure for array data types. We have array operations in terms of assignments into the logical tree, but we have no array variable directly in ESQL to which we could assign the result of the split. It is for this reason that we have (for example) a poor man's substitute of SUBSTRING which can be used with BEFORE. So you could do something like:

SUBSTRING('Hello World!' BEFORE 'World'); ... which would return 'Hello '.

I suspect this is the kind of thing you have used in your loop?
We're updating the status of this RFE to Uncommitted Candidate, but for other readers passing through here, we would appreciate any suggestions for the precise syntax of the function (working within the constraint of not introducing an array data type).

Although the specific implementation of functions here might not match an actual implementation in IIB, the ability to split strings on delimiters is widely needed. An efficient, well documented, inbuilt function would make development of any ESQL code that worked with delimited strings much simpler and potentially faster, compared with having to implement splitting functions in ESQL itself.

Attachment (Description): Stackoverflow answer for an ESQL implementation of a StringSplitter