Question

I’m trying to replace only certain parts of a string via an SQL query.

The column holds data formatted as so:

United States Postal Service&nbsp;<br> (Express Mail<sup>&reg;</sup><br>---Approx. delivery time 07-Sep-2011):

I’m trying to make it export like so:

United States Postal Service (Express Mail---Approx. delivery time 07-Sep-2011):

To do this, I used CASE, like so:

SELECT 
    CASE ot.title
        WHEN 'Free' THEN ''
        WHEN '&nbsp;<br>' THEN ' '
        WHEN '<sup>&reg;</sup> ' THEN ' '
        WHEN '<br>---' THEN '---'
        ELSE ot.title
    END
FROM orders_total AS ot;

However, it won’t work. I assume CASE only supports handling the entire string, not just a part of it.

Any ideas?

Peace,
Chris

The REPLACE function solved the issue, working subquery here:

(SELECT REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(ot.title, '(For orders of $75.00 or more with a maximum package weight of 50  lbs ):', ''), '&nbsp;<br>', ' '), '<sup>&reg;</sup>', ' '), '<br>', '') FROM orders_total AS ot WHERE ot.orders_id = o.orders_id AND ot.class = 'ot_shipping') AS orders_shipping_class

Answer 1

You’ll probably want to use multiple, nested REPLACE functions here. I’ll give a sample for the first 2 cases so you get the idea.

SELECT REPLACE(REPLACE(ot.title, 'Free', ''), '&nbsp;<br>', ' ')
    FROM orders_total AS ot;