SQL & PL/SQL

Hi,

This is my first question, hopefully I'm doing this right, so I'm writing from a .CSV file into a table and then create a view from that table, taking only some of the fields in order to write them into another CSV file.

Here is my issue with a field from the view:

I want to get rid of the parenthesis, I couldn't find any definitive method on the net, so I have tried trimming the first and last '()' from the string using case :

I got the following error:

I tried the same logic using case this time testing the string length (since 9 would be the longest):

SELECT CASE

WHEN length (a.base_amt)=9 THEN (select distinct substr(a.base_amt, 2, length(a.base_amt)-1) from CRD_AMT a )

ELSE

(select distinct a.base_amt from crd_amt a)

 END

FROM CRD\_AMT a

I have received the same error.

Now I know that this is not the best way at all to achieve what I need, I, I'm sure there is a way to ignore the parenthesis but i couldn't find anything that works..

I hope you experts perhaps have a solution.

Thanks!!