I'm trying to figure out how to change a string with another string in mySQL. I don't have much experience with databases. I've read several answers here, but I'm still getting errors.
This is what I started with
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (
post_content,
'whatever',
'Hello');
but it keeps giving me errors.
So, I started to escape special characters like ;(),'_> but I still get an error message. What am I missing?
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (
post_content,
'whatever',
'<a href="https://www.notarealdomain.com" onClick="ga(''send''\, ''event''\, ''Banner''\, ''Link''\, ''Page''\)\;" target="\\_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"\>Hello</a\>');
My Situation:
I have url's in a field containing blog posts. The url's are being stored in my database with escape characters. My task at the moment is to replace some already inserted 'http' url's with 'https' url's, but REPLACE will match neither the original url nor the escaped url. I can't just replace every instance of 'http:', because I only want to affect certain links in each post, not every link.
I am very familiar with SQL, as well as REPLACE, so I'm not just asking how REPLACE works and how to use it. Another user here has tested my queries in his environment and they work. So, there must be something in my configuration that is preventing the queries from functioning as expected.
I have searched this site and google extensively for several hours and have found nothing specifically addressing my issue. Everything I have tried is included below and if there is something else I should try, I don't know what that is and I haven't found any suggestions/posts/comments that suggest doing anything differently.
Example URL:
http://test01.mysite.com
As Stored in DB:
http:\/\/test01.mysite.com
Code to Re-Create Situation:
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS test_posts;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS test_posts (
id int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
post_content longtext NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
)
INSERT INTO
test_posts
(post_content)
VALUES
('content content content Link I want to change content content content Link I don\'t want to change content content content Link I want to change content content content Link I don\'t want to change');
If I run
UPDATE
test_posts
SET
post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'http://test01.mysite.com', 'https://test01.mysite.com');
or
UPDATE
test_posts
SET
post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'http:\/\/test01.mysite.com', 'https://test01.mysite.com');
zero records are affected.
For testing purposes, I ran the following query which returns 0 rows.
SELECT
*
FROM
test_posts
WHERE
post_content LIKE '%http://test01.mysite.com%'
OR
post_content LIKE '%http:\/\/test01.mysite.com%'
OR
post_content LIKE '%http:\\/\\/test01.mysite.com%'
OR
post_content LIKE 'http:%/%/test01.mysite.com%';
If I run:
SELECT
*
FROM
test_posts
WHERE
post_content LIKE '%http:_/_/test01.mysite.com%'
It does return matches, but that doesn't solve the real problem of how to match when using UPDATE/REPLACE.
I have tried on two different servers and I get the same results on both.
I have tried the following Engine/Collation combinations and all return the same 0 records results:
MyISAM/latin1_swedish_ci
MyISAM/utf8mb4_unicode_ci
InnoDB/latin1_swedish_ci
InnoDB/utf8mb4_unicode_ci
Anybody know how I can write these queries so that REPLACE will find matches to those url's or what settings in my database or PhpMyAdmin may be causing the queries to return/affect 0 rows?
I think the backslash must be escaped in MySQL
field_name LIKE 'http:\\/\\/test01.mysite.com%'
Of course one could go for sure and use the single char wildcard __
field_name LIKE 'http:_/_/test01.mysite.com%'
or for your both cases: an optional backslash:
field_name LIKE 'http:%/%/test01.mysite.com%'
I'm still baffled as to why the queries with LIKE won't work, but, sadly, using those to narrow down the problem clouded my judgement and I didn't try all the same combinations in the REPLACE functions.
The following works:
UPDATE
test_posts
SET
post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'http:\\/\\/test01.mysite.com', 'https://test01.mysite.com');
If anyone can explain to me why these combinations work with REPLACE, but not with LIKE, I'd really love to know. Thanks!
There is no reason, your query won't work if you have run properly, there is something else, you may be missing here.
UPDATE
test1
SET
name_1 = REPLACE(name_1, 'http:\/\/test01.mysite.com', 'https://test01.mysite.com')
works well and does the job of repalcing the \/ with /.
See screen-shot attached,
You may have some other problem, please check and update the question, if so.
Edit after comments
If you have more data points in URL, change query like below.
UPDATE
test1
SET
name_1 = REPLACE(name_1, '\/', '/')
Above will replace all the occurrence of \/ with /.
As \\ did not work to represent/escape a backslash, use regular expression functions:
REGEXP_LIKE('.*http:\\/\\/test01\.mysite.com.*')
REGEXP_REPLACE(field, 'http:\\/\\/', 'http://')
Here \\ should work.
I am not a huge expert in MYSQL nor Regex (I guess I need to use some here), I would appreciate any help.
So my problem is that I would like to change some hardcoded URLs in Wordpress post contents to different ones.
Here is an example of a URL:
http://cdn1.domain.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/16211742/Screenshot_051117_101304_AM.jpg
Now, 'cdn1' can be cdn, cdn1 or cdn2. We might need to run 3 queries, but that is not a problem.
I would like to change all instances of this to:
//domain.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/16211742/Screenshot_051117_101304_AM.jpg
So basically remove the cdn (cdn, cdn1, cdn2) part, and remove the timestamp URL part before the filename.
The Wordpress database is something like this:
UPDATE wp_posts
SET post_content =
WHERE
Thank you very much!
First of all, take a database Backup for safety.
Then you can do this with SQL Command like this
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://www.oldurl','http://www.newurl');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://www.oldurl', 'http://www.newurl');
UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = replace(meta_value,'http://www.oldurl','http://www.newurl');
OR you can do this with the plugin called: WP Migrate DB
There has a tutorial on the plugin page. check that.
Hope it will help you. :)
UPDATE database_posts
SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content,'%submitted by%%%%%', '');
Is it possible in SQL to perform an UPDATE and REPLACE using wildcards? I'm trying to remove the author from the post_content column, everything after/including %submitted by%%%%%.
The submitted by value is always different. I've tried using the query above with no luck.
Thanks!!
If you want to keep everything up to submitted by and nothing after, you can use substring_index():
UPDATE database_posts
SET post_content = SUBSTRING_INDEX(post_content, 'submitted by', 1)
WHERE post_content LIKE '%submitted by%';
I have no idea what all the spaces are between "submitted" and "by", but they are in your question.
I ran this sql command as was trying to put a slash after domain.com so image urls worked when moving a wordpress website between domains and now all the post_content fields are just urls?
like this
http://domain.com?page_id=7
Any ideas why this happened or any way to change it back?
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, "domain.comwp-content", "domain.com/wp-content");