Question

I have a MySQL table with a VARCHAR field called ‘name’ and a few thousand rows. Each row is formatted like:

‘Some text <1000 – 2000>’

I would like to remove the ‘<1000 – 2000>’ part, leaving just the ‘Hello world’ text. The text and numbers are different for each row. How can this be done with a query? I assume some sort of regular expression.

Any help is appreciated

Answer 1

Use INSTR and REVERSE to get the position of the < character then remove it by index:

UPDATE `table` SET `name` = SUBSTRING( `name`, 0, INSTR( REVERSE( `name` ), `<` ) )