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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T23:40:34+00:00

This is a fairly odd question… I believe it would involve some sort of

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This is a fairly odd question… I believe it would involve some sort of regex with MySQL.

Say I have a query on a table as such below:

    >select description from foo;
 ----------------------------------
 |   description                  |
 ----------------------------------
  Kitten, 3 in., Lightsaber
  Mouse, 5.5 in., Luke Skywalker
  Dog, 9.000 in., Death Star

Is there a way to update foo such that the “inches” (in.) portions are to three decimal places.

i.e. After the update:

    >select description from foo;
 -----------------------------------
 |   description                    |
 -----------------------------------
  Kitten, 3.000 in., Lightsaber
  Mouse, 5.500 in., Luke Skywalker
  Dog, 9.000 in., Death Star

Any advice/guidance is greatly appreciated! Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    According to the documentation, that’s not possible in a SELECT command.

    REGEXP only tells you if it’s a match or not; it does not provide match indexes or substitution.

    You should export the data to a flat text file, treat it with your favorite Regex enable text editor and re-apply the data to a brand new data structure. Seriously, you have to change your DB design.

    Update

    After further investigation, it seems like my answer should be: it’s not possible out of the box.

    Check this topic: How to do a regular expression replace in MySQL? You can do that via SQL through UDF.

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