Search and replace

[Bertjuhh66]

I want to delete some text in my database. The only thing is that the text is random, but allways between brackets. So, I need to do a seach with wildcards I think, but I can't find a way to do this.

So, I need a way to search for "(random text)" including the brackets and then delete it...Is this possible in MySQL?

[johanafm]

If you know that [...] is there, you can

CONCAT(SUBSTRING_INDEX(col, '[', 1), 'replacement text', SUBSTRING_INDEX(col, ']', -1))

But since everything is returned by SUBSTRING_INDEX when the delimiter is missing, you will most likely not get the desired results otherwise.

Also, the above will deal with just the first occurence of [ and ]. Thus, if you have several such pairs, you'd need to run the query multiple times.

The above code doens't care about unbalanced pairs either. It just takes everything up to the first [, adds the replacement text and then adds everything after the first ].

If you need more advanced string handling, it's easier to do it using PHP, such as with [man]preg_replace[/man]