Last word in a sentence: In SQL (regular expressions possible?)

Question

I need this to be done in Oracle SQL (10gR2). But I guess, I would rather put it plainly, any good, efficient algorithm is fine.

Given a line (or sentence, containing one or many words, English), how will you find the last word of the sentence?

Here is what I have tried in SQL. But, I would like to see an efficient way of doing this.

select reverse(substr(reverse(&p_word_in)
                         , 0
                         , instr(reverse(&p_word_in), ' ')
                         )
                  )
      from dual;

The idea was to reverse the string, find the first occurring space, retrieve the substring and reverse the string. Is it quite efficient? Is a regular expression available? I am on Oracle 10g R2. But I dont mind seeing any attempt in other programming language, I wont mind writing a PL/SQL function if need be.

Update:

Jeffery Kemp has given a wonderful answer. This works perfectly.

Answer

SELECT SUBSTR(&sentence, INSTR(&sentence,' ',-1) + 1)
FROM dual

Answer 1

This regex matches the last word on a line:

\w+$

And RegexBuddy gives this code for use in Oracle:

DECLARE
        match VARCHAR2(255);
BEGIN
        match := REGEXP_SUBSTR(subject, '[[:alnum:]]_+$', 1, 1, 'c');
END;

Answer 2

Not sure how it is performance wise, but this should do it:

select regexp_substr(&p_word_in, '\S+$') from dual;

Answer 3

I'm not sure if you can use a regex in oracle, but wouldn't

(\w+)\W*$

work?

Answer 4

this leaves the punctuation but gets the final word

with datam as (
SELECT 'abc asdb.' A FROM DUAL UNION
select 'ipso factum' a from dual union
select 'ipso factum' a from dual union
SELECT 'ipso factum2' A FROM DUAL UNION
SELECT 'ipso factum!' A FROM DUAL UNION
SELECT 'ipso factum  !' A FROM DUAL UNION
SELECT 'ipso factum/**//*/?.?' A FROM DUAL UNION
SELECT 'ipso factum  ...??!?!**' A FROM DUAL UNION
select 'ipso factum ..d.../.>' a from dual 

)
SELECT a,
--REGEXP_SUBSTR(A, '[[:alnum:]]_+$', 1, 1, 'c') , /** these are the other examples*/
--REGEXP_SUBSTR(A, '\S+$') ,  /** these are the other examples*/
regexp_substr(a, '[a-zA-Z]+[^a-zA-Z]*$')  

from datam

Answer 5

I reckon it's simpler with INSTR/SUBSTR:

WITH q AS (SELECT 'abc def ghi' AS sentence FROM DUAL)
SELECT SUBSTR(sentence, INSTR(sentence,' ',-1) + 1)
FROM q;