Question

Hey everyone, I’ve got a problem and Google hasn’t yielded the help I need so I’m turning to the experts 😉

I’ve got a MySQL database and one field is used for user input. Some users feel the need to quote their entry like so: “cheese press” and I need to change all entries in that column that have “quotes” to brackets like so: (cheese press)

I’ve tried these:

UPDATE `inputColumn` SET `userInput` = REPLACE(`userInput`, '"', '(');

The results were obvious the second I hit enter: (cheese press(
I did this on a test field, no worries.

Then I tried:

UPDATE `inputColumn` SET `userInput` = REPLACE(`userInput`, '"%', '(');

That didn’t do anything at all and neither did

UPDATE `inputColumn` SET `userInput` = REPLACE(`userInput`, '"%"', '(%)');

I really don’t want to go through and update 3000 records manually 🙂 any ideas?

Answer 1

Perhaps something like this.

UPDATE `inputColumn`
SET    `userInput` = CONCAT('(', SUBSTR(`userInput`, 2, LENGTH(`userInput`)-2), ')')
WHERE  `userInput` LIKE '"%"';