Regular expression capture groups in Oracle PL/SQL

I'm trying to turn free-form text into something more structured. I have a complex pattern that matches the great majority (well above the minimum acceptable limit) of the data availab开发者_运维知识库le, and I'd like to use that to assist in structuring the data, rather than parsing the text character-by-character. The problem that I've just run into is that Oracle does not seem to have any way of handling capture groups (unless I somehow missed it?).

For example,my expression has quite a few named capture groups such as ((?<runit_ID>\d+)-) and (STAT_N|STTN|STAT|STN) ?(?<STAT>\w+). The codebase is written entirely in PL/SQL so I can't use C# or something else to refer to the capture groups by name. How do people work around this in PL/SQL?

Assuming you are using Oracle 10g or higher, you can use REGEXP_REPLACE with backreferences.

See examples in the Oracle docs for REGEXP_REPLACE and in this article at regular-expressions.info.