SQLite is so light, it doesn’t have any useful string functions. It doesn’t have ASCII(), LPAD(), RPAD(), REPEAT(), POSITION(), you name it. It does, however, have a wonderful RANDOMBLOB() function. So if you really need a good random number generator, use a SQLite database and generate a 1GB blob. That should give you a couple of random numbers for the next years.

For a full (or rather, empty) list see the SQLite function reference here:
http://www.sqlite.org/lang_corefunc.html

Function Simulation: REPEAT()

Not having any functions doesn’t mean that you can’t simulate them. You can. Take REPEAT(), for instance. Apart from the RANDOMBLOB(), you can also generate a ZEROBLOB(). It’s a blob with lots of zeros in it. But you can’t just go and do this:

-- Simulate REPEAT('abc', 3)
replace(zeroblob(3), 0, 'abc')

That would be too easy. The problem with the zeroblob is, that when cast to a string, it is actually a zero-terminated string. Quite usual when programming in C. But hey, the first character is a zero, so the resulting string is terminated right at the beginning. How useful is that??

But here’s a trick, QUOTE() the ZEROBLOB(). That would escape all characters in hex format. In other words:

quote(zeroblob(3)) yields X'000000'

Nice. Now we’ve got three extra letters around twice as many zeroes as we wanted. So we’ll simply do this

-- Simulate REPEAT('abc', 3)
replace(substr(quote(zeroblob(2)), 3, 3), '0', 'abc')

-- Or more generally: X = 'abc', Y = 3
replace(substr(quote(zeroblob((Y + 1) / 2)), 3, Y), '0', X)

Doesn’t that start to make fun? Note, I have documented this simulation also here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11568496/how-to-simulate-repeat-in-sqlite

Function Simulation: LPAD() and RPAD()

REPEAT() was easy. But REPEAT() was inspired by LPAD() and RPAD(), which is similar to REPEAT(), except that a character is padded to the left or right of another string, until a given length of the resulting string is reached. ZEROBLOB() will help us again! Let’s consider RPAD():

-- Simulate RPAD('abc', 7, '-')
'abc' || replace(replace(substr(quote(zeroblob(4)), 3, 4), '''', ''), '0', '-')

-- Or more generally:
-- RPAD() Using X = 7, Y = '-', Z = 'abc'
Z || replace(
       replace(
         substr(
           quote(zeroblob((X + 1) / 2)), 
           3, (X - length(Z))
         ), '''', ''
       ), '0', Y
     )

-- LPAD() Using X = 7, Y = '-', Z = 'abc'
replace(
  replace(
    substr(
      quote(zeroblob((X + 1) / 2)), 
      3, (X - length(Z))
    ), '''', ''
  ), '0', Y
) || Z

Now if this isn’t funky! This was actually something, I didn’t come up with myself. This was an answer I was given on Stack Overflow, where great minds spend lots of spare time on weird problems like this:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6576343/how-to-simulate-lpad-rpad-with-sqlite

Of course, these simulations will be part of the next version of jOOQ, so you don’t have to worry any longer about how to do LPAD(), RPAD(), and REPEAT().