Question

I’m trying to replace all instances of an old BB tag markup in a MySql database with a newer, slightly different one.

The old format is this…

[youtube:********]{Video ID}[/youtube:********]

Which I would like to replace with this…

[youtube:********]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v={Video ID}[/youtube:********]

Where the *’s are a random string of alpha-numeric characters. So simply REPLACE(feild, '[youtube:********]', '[youtube:********]http://www.youtube.com?watch?v= won’t do unfortunately.

All the clumsy attempts I’ve made using REPLACE() and INSTR() have resulted in nasty things like [b]Bold Text[/b]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

Is there a way to do this kind of pattern replacement in MySql? Possibly with Regular Expressions?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Is this what you tried?

UPDATE table SET Field = REPLACE(Field,']{',']http://www.youtube.com/watch?v={')

This would depend if there isnt any other occurences of ‘]{‘

EDIT: You may also want to try:

UPDATE table SET Field = LEFT(Field,#) + 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v='+ 
RIGHT(Field,(Char_Length(Field)-#);

Just check the syntax with MYSQl docs. Char_LNEGTH() may need to be LENGTH() – im sure you get the idea