Question

How might I tell mysql to..

delete the first 3 characters from mytable.title only where the first 3 characters are numbers 01-10 followed by a space?

Example..

Delete any record in the ‘title’ column that looks like this:

01 California
09 Texas
10 Idaho

Leave the records alone that don’t start with a number and space (such as these):

California
Texas
Idaho

I have several thousand records that I want to remove these preceding numbers from. Thoughts?

Answer 1

UPDATE my_table SET title=SUBSTRING(title, 4) WHERE title REGEXP '^[0-9][0-9] ';