Parsing a string in a column

Greetings to all SQL guru's. System details: Digital UNIX 4.0E - IDS 7.31FC4 In order to do some analysis on some data, I need to extract text from one field and insert that into another table. I can unload data to a text file and use Awk to parse it, then load it into the destination table for analysis, but I'd rather find a SQL method if possible. Here's a sample: ...|307|1|random length string -12298 more random text|... ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ strip this out this too! ...|105|15|shorter string 243 more stuff here|... ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ strip this out this too! What I'm trying to do is parse out everything from the text string except the signed numeric values. I can get the job done with the IDS String manipulation functions (substr, replace and the like) but I can only manage it by running a procedure over and over against a single record, and I've got to do this on approx. 90,000 records daily. Phew. So far, Awk is far preferable to what I've managed. Is there any reasonable way to accomplish this using SQL, or should I stick with the unload - Awk - load process? Thanks for your time in advance! Brad Kittredge Data Analyst brad.kittredge@metrokc.gov