Question

I am trying to identify which posts on a wordpress installation contains empty paragraphs, I found one manually and clicked “edit”, this is what I see:

So then I tried a query like:

SELECT *
FROM `wp_posts`
WHERE `post_content` LIKE '%<p> </p>%'

No results returned, and "<p> </p>" is copy pasted manually from that row I found. I’ve also tried REGEXP with a pattern like this :

#<p[^>]*>(\s|&nbsp;?)*</p>#

But still got no results back, what can I do to find those empty paragraphs?

Answer 1

Why are you searching on post_title instead of post_content?

SELECT ID
  FROM `wp_posts`
 WHERE `post_content` LIKE '%<p> </p>%'

Should work. If you want to use REGEXP and allow for paragraphs with   in them:

SELECT ID
  FROM `wp_posts`
 WHERE `post_content` REGEXP '<p>[[:blank:]]*(&nbps;)?[[:blank:]]*</p>'