Question

Attempting to change the “files” folder location in a Drupal site from /files to /sites/default/files.

In order to avoid changing anything else such as

  http://www.google.com/profiles/

I’m trying to use a basic regular expression with a word boundary.

  \bfiles/

A quick check in regexpal is working as expected, but when I enter the above in the phpMyAdmin search , checking the “as regular expression” checkbox, I don’t get the expected result.

Two questions:

• How should I write my expression with a word boundary so that it works in phpMyAdmin?

• I’m really a newbie at SQL statements! Would it be possible to write a SQL query that would simply look for every occurrence of “files/” & replace it with “sites/default/files/”?

Answer 1

According to the MySql docs, the regex flavour used is POSIX 1003.2. For this flavour of regex, word boundaries are as follows:

[[:<:]] (beginning) [[:>:]] (end)

so your regex would be:

[[:<:]]files/

If you want to use sql to search and replace all instances of [[:<:]]files/ from a specific field in a table, you could use a UDF such as the one found here

Also, you should be aware of the following while using regex with MySql:

Because MySQL uses the C escape syntax in strings (for example, “\n”
to represent the newline character), you must double any “\” that you
use in your REGEXP strings.