Get source code for Oracle database objects: user_source view

We can query Oracle user_source to get the source code about functions, procedures, triggers, etc. User_source contains 4 columns, i.e., name, type, line and text.

On my schema, the following query shows that there are 55 lines of source code for functions, 50 lines of source code for procedures, etc.

SQL> select type, count(*) from user_source group by type order by type;
TYPE COUNT(*)
------------ ----------
FUNCTION 55
PACKAGE 31
PACKAGE BODY 469
PROCEDURE 50

The following query shows the definition of a function z_cap. Thus, user_source is a very handy way to retrieve the source code.

SQL> select line, text from user_source where name='Z_CAP';
LINE TEXT
---------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 FUNCTION z_cap (
2 p_data number,
3 low number,
4 hi number
5 )
6 RETURN NUMBER IS
7 v_number NUMBER;
8 BEGIN
9 if p_data 10 elsif p_data>hi then v_number:= hi;
11 else v_number:= p_data;
12 end if;
13 return v_number;
14 END z_cap;