Oracle Homework - LPAD / RPAD Error?

Question

I am trying to write a statement that will produce "Oracle$$$Internet$$$Academy" using LPAD and RPAD commands. this is what I have so far, but I am getting a missing right parenthesis error.

SELECT LPAD(RPAD('Oracle', 10,'$$$')RPAD('Internet',24,'$$$'))
FROM dual;

Answer 1

Do you need to use both RPAD and LPAD? If not, you are simply missing the concatenation characters of ||

SELECT RPAD('Oracle', 9,'$$$')||RPAD('Internet',11,'$$$')||'Academy' FROM dual

EDIT: Even better:

SELECT RPAD('Oracle', 9,'$$$')||'Internet'||LPAD('Academy',10,'$$$') FROM dual

Answer 2

If you want to use both LPAD and RPAD you could do something like this.

SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf

  1  SELECT RPAD('Oracle', length('Oracle')+3,'$')||
  2         'Internet' ||
  3         LPAD('Academy', length('Academy')+3, '$' )
  4*   FROM dual
SQL> /

RPAD('ORACLE',LENGTH('ORACL
---------------------------
Oracle$$$Internet$$$Academy

I'm using the length of the strings 'Oracle' and 'Academy' rather than hard-coding values. And I'm only specifying the dollar sign once-- LPAD and RPAD automatically take care of appending it the proper number of times.