Help looping through a mysql database

[pseudocool]

Here is the breakdown for the issue i am having...

I want to loop through the db and convert the strings & add to the new column so i do not need to do it manually as there are thousands of entries.
I have figured out some stuff about while loops and i think that is what i need to do...

1. Get data from each row in oldNum
2. Remove the special characters from the string
3. Add the new clean data to the same row in newNum

example of what results should look like in the sql db:

id | oldNum | newNum

1 | 3.12(a) | 312a

You dont need to write the solution for me, if you can point me in the right direction that would be great too.
thanks in advance guys!

[bradgrafelman]

Can you define what "special characters" are?

If it's a simple transformation (e.g. just replace all non-alphanumeric characters with nothing), then it's quite possible that you don't even need a loop at all and can just execute a single SQL query... e.g.:

UPDATE myTable SET newNum = DO_SOMETHING_TO(oldNum)

[pseudocool]

yea actually i have the function set up to remove the special characters:

<?php

$string =  "";
$new_string = preg_replace(“/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/”, “”, $string);

?>

[pseudocool]

Not trying to bump, there is no edit button on the previous reply....I actually am working on this still, however my new focus is how to implement the cleaning properly...I cant seem to pass the 'oldNum' column data to the cleanString function appropriately here is what i have now

function cleanString($string) {
   $new_string = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/", "", $string);
   return $new_string;
}

if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {
   $db = @mysql_select_db($db, $connection) or die(mysql_error());
   $sql = "UPDATE theTable SET newNum = " . cleanString(oldNum);
   $result = @mysql_query($sql, $connection) or die(mysql_error());
}  

[anoopmail]

you just can't pass php functions to mysql. They are needs to be build in mysql function or user defined inside mysql.
This says how can you use regular expressions in a mysql query
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/regexp.html

[pseudocool]

Yea, haha, I figured that out...I actually solved the problem.

Thanks again guys! Now check my other post maybe and help me with fulltext search 😉