Using REGEXP_REPLACE

Our system is running IBM i 7.3 with the latest PTF's and TR's (PTF's and TR's installed in the last 2 weeks).

Jerry Ven recently asked questions about extracting the numeric values from a character field to use as a key for joining the file to another file which has a numeric key.

I believe that someone had suggested using the SQL REGEXP_REPLACE scalar function.

Searching for examples, I found this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56151437/ibm-db2-select-numeric-characters-only-from-a-column

which gave the following example:


SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(
'123Red345', '[A-Za-z]','',1)
FROM sysibm.sysdummy1

indicating that this statement should return the value '123345'.

However, when I run this SQL statement it returns the value
'123Red345'.

What gives?

Regards,
Steve Landess
(512) 289-0387