Search and Replace in MySQL

mshields — Tue, 18 May 2010 12:59:51 +0000

I do a lot of work with MySQL and I’ve had this reoccuring problem were I need to find some text in a table and replace it with new text. Like say I have a table of data that talks about dogs and I want to replace every occurrence of dog with cat. The old way I would search the entire table to find all rows that have the word dog in it, then that would give me a list to manually update each row. I’d then rerun the query to see if I missed any.

Recently I found that MySQL supports a command called what else but “replace”. So let’s say I have a table called “news” and in the table is a column called “content” and I wanted to replace all references of “dog” with “cat”, here is an example query.

update news set content = replace(content, “dog”, “cat”);

Very simple, it tells MySQL to replace the “content” field with what’s in the “content” field but replace “dog” with “cat”.

SQL Joke

mshields — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:04:15 +0000

A SQL query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables and says, “Can I join you?”

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Search and Replace in MySQL

SQL Joke