How to break a phrase into words in Oracle

This is a technique to get the individual words in a phrase.
It is based on the use of:

• PIPELINED functions, and
• Regular Expressions
  

First we need a object type and a corresponding collection (to be used by the PIPELINED function).

CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE     typ_word AS OBJECT
(
  text VARCHAR2(64)
)
/

CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE TYP_word_COL
AS TABLE OF TYP_word;
/

The function itself:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION get_words (v_sentence VARCHAR2)
   RETURN typ_word_col PIPELINED
AS
   occurence   PLS_INTEGER   := 1;
   aword       VARCHAR2 (64);
BEGIN
   LOOP
      aword := REGEXP_SUBSTR (v_sentence, '\w+', 1, occurence);

      IF aword IS NULL
      THEN
         RETURN;
      END IF;

      PIPE ROW (NEW typ_word(aword));
      occurence := occurence + 1;
   END LOOP;
END;
/