I have thousands of rows in a field where many of them contain - as the last character. I need to use the values as URL so these URLs are broken because of that. Could someone give me the SQL command for phpmyadmin to remove them without removing the other hyphens?
I'm going to assume you are using MySQL... Because you didn't specify anything. This will probably port to other SQL versions as well though. In any case, interpret this as pseudo SQL code and you should get somewhere.
Try something like this:
SELECT
CASE WHEN RIGHT(My_Col, 1) = '-' THEN SUBSTR(My_Col, 0, LENGTH(My_Col)-2)
ELSE My_Col AS My_Valid_Link
FROM
My_Table
Here is the SQL you need in case you use MySQL:
UPDATE your_table SET your_url = SUBSTR(your_url, 1, LENGTH(your_url) - 1)
WHERE RIGHT(your_url, 1) = '-'
Explanation: RIGHT("https://www.example.com/bad-url-", 1) will equal "-".
We find all urls with hyphen at the end and replace the bad url with the same url but without the hyphen at the end (like #eatonphil post)
Warning: If your_url field has a unique key on it, it is possible that you will receive a duplicate key error.
Related
In my database I have a table called 'content' and a field called 'link' and there are almost 300,000 records in that table.
In the field called 'link' there are a number of records that look like this :
http://www.example.com/blah/blah/123456789/url=http://www.destination.com
Unfortunately the prefix part of the records are individually unique where the numbered portion is constant changing from 90 to 150 alpha-numeric characters
I would like to remove the prefix up to and/or including the url=
So that the only thing left in the record is :
http://www.destination.com OR
I could even work with
url=http://www.destination.com
and simply do a replace command against the "url=" part as a second mysql command.
If there was a wildcard command, this job would be much easier and I would just wildcard everything showing up in the link record between :
http://www.example.com/blah/blah/ wildcard url=
But as everyone knows... there is no such wildcard available
So it had me looking at the UPDATE, SET and TRIM(LEADING commands
UPDATE content
SET link =
TRIM(LEADING 'url=' FROM link)
But this DID NOT generate the changes I wanted
And so I took the labor intensive method of downloading the database and using a Search and Replace program to make the changes to the 44 thousand records that contained these parameters.
But I would love to find a command that I could simply pass to the database to make this simpler in the future.
Any thoughts on how to accomplish this change in the future would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance ;
You can use the SUBSTRING_INDEX function:
UPDATE content SET link=SUBSTRING_INDEX( `link` , 'url=', -1 )
I have not tested it, so I would recommend you check that substring_index returns the desired string first.
Assuming that the part you want to keep always begins with 'http://' you could get the desired result string with the help of the SUBSTRING_INDEX function:
SELECT CONCAT('http://', SUBSTRING_INDEX(link, 'http://', -1)) FROM content;
and fix your table with the simple statement
UPDATE
content
SET
link = CONCAT('http://', SUBSTRING_INDEX(link, 'http://', -1));
Explanation:
SUBSTRING_INDEX with third parameter negative returns the substring from the last occurence of the needle in the second parameter to the end. Because 'http://' isn't included in the return value, we add it again.
Remark:
If you've got https:// urls too, you should be able to adapt my solution.
Can someone give me an example of how to remove anything after a dash "-" in a zip code field using SQL commands?
For example, change any of this:
XXXXX-X
XXXXX-
XXXXX-XX
XXXXX-XXXX
to this:
XXXXX
Thanks for the examples. I also need to remove any instances of "-", "-X', "-XXXX", etc in the databases so the zip codes just contain five digits. Can someone include an example of this?
Given that your field is named zip , then just do this:
SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(zip, '-', 1) as zip
that would return what you want.
To update the data on the table you can do:
update table set zip = SUBSTRING_INDEX(zip, '-', 1) where condition = foo
that would update only records matching some condition, if you want to update them all remove the where part
Instead of using a regex, you could use MySQL's SUBSTRING_INDEX() method:
SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(zip_code, '-', 1) FROM your_table
EDIT (to support updates)
UPDATE your_table SET zip_code = SUBSTRING_INDEX(zip_code, '-', 1);
I'd recommend creating a second column, maybe zip_code_short and running SET zip_code_short = instead of overwriting the main data - just to make sure it doesn't cause any errors first (if feasible).
I have 2000 products with row that is using serialized data and I need to update specific string
this is the row name data
a:35:{s:11:"expire_days";s:3:"30d";s:12:"trial1_price";s:0:"";s:11:"trial1_days";s:0:"";s:12:"is_recurring";s:0:"";s:10:"start_date";s:0:"";s:5:"terms";s:24:"$150 for 1 Per license";s:12:"rebill_times";s:0:"";s:15:"paypal_currency";s:0:"";s:4:"##11";N;s:3:"url";s:0:"";s:8:"add_urls";s:0:"";s:4:"##12";N;s:5:"scope";s:0:"";s:5:"order";s:4:"1010";s:11:"price_group";s:1:"7";s:13:"renewal_group";s:2:"28";s:14:"need_agreement";s:0:"";s:13:"require_other";a:1:{i:0;s:0:"";}s:16:"prevent_if_other";N;s:4:"##13";N;s:19:"autoresponder_renew";s:0:"";s:16:"dont_mail_expire";s:0:"";s:13:"joomla_access";s:2:"36";s:10:"files_path";s:108:"products/Boxes8.zip|Box 8
products/Boxes9.zip|Box 9";s:14:"download_count";s:0:"";s:18:"download_unlimited";}
and only thing I need changed is
s:24:"$150 for 1 Per license";
any help is appreciated.
You should probably SELECT the row, make your changes, then UPDATE with the new value. The answer to this question may be helpful if you need to do this database side.
How to do a regular expression replace in MySQL?
If you want to replace the value of that single field with something else, you can use the following query:
UPDATE table SET col = CONCAT(
LEFT(col, LOCATE('s:24:"', col) + 5), -- up to and including the opening quote
'Now for free', -- new replacement text
SUBSTR(col, LOCATE('"', col, LOCATE('s:24:"', col)+6)) -- closing quote and everything after that
) WHERE col LIKE '%s:24:"$150 for 1 Per license"%'
Note that there is potential for trouble: if the value of one of your fields should end in 's:24:', then that combined with the closing quote would get misinterpreded as the location you're looking at. I consider this risk unlikely, but if you want to play it safe, you might want to check for that with an elaborate regular expression that can deal with quoted strings and escaped quotes.
Using MS Access 2010.
I have a field in a table that contains windows path names surrounded by quotes, like this
"C:\My Documents\Photos\img1.jpg"
"C:\My Documents\Photos\products\gizmo.jpg"
"C:\My Documents\Photos\img5.jpg"
and so on.
I need to get rid of the quotes so the column looks like this:
C:\My Documents\Photos\img1.jpg
C:\My Documents\Photos\products\gizmo.jpg
C:\My Documents\Photos\img5.jpg
Is there a way to write an update query to do this?
OR a better way to do it altogether?
If you will be doing this from within an Access session, using Access 2000 or later, you can use the Replace() function in an update query to remove the quotes. Remove would mean replace them with an empty string.
UPDATE YourTable
SET path_field = Replace(path_field, '"', '');
If any of those path strings could include quotes within them (yuck!), consider the Mid() function ... ask it to start at the 2nd character (skipping the lead quote), and return the number of characters equivalent to Len(path_field) - 2
UPDATE YourTable
SET path_field = Mid(path_field, 2, Len(path_field) - 2);
Either way, you may want to include a WHERE clause to ignore rows without path_field values.
WHERE Len(path_field) > 0
And if you must do this again when new data is added, use a different WHERE clause to ensure you UPDATE only those rows whose path_field values start and end with quotes.
WHERE path_field Like '"*"'
That was using the * wild card for Access' default ANSI 89 mode. If you will do this from ADO (ANSI 92 mode), use the % wild card.
WHERE path_field Like '"%"'
... or use ALike and the % wild card with either mode.
WHERE path_field ALike '"%"'
The solution with REPLACE already mentioned by others works, but removes ALL quotes, even if they are in the middle of the string.
If you only want to remove quotes at the beginning or at the end, but leave quotes in the middle of the string as they are, you can do it with the following two queries:
Remove first character if it's a quote:
update YourTable
set YourField = right(YourField, len(YourField) - 1)
where left(YourField, 1) = '"'
Remove last character if it's a quote:
update YourTable
set YourTable = left(YourField, len(YourField) - 1)
where right(YourField, 1) = '"'
To make this a permanent change, you might run an update query that looked something like this:
UPDATE [Your Table]
SET [Your Table].[Your Field] = Replace([Your Table].[Your Field],"""","")
This will get rid of all quotes, even if they aren't at the beginning or end. Post back if that's not exactly what you want.
Assuming your column name is MyColumn and table name is MyTable, you can use this sql to update your data to get rid of quotes.
UPDATE MyTable
SET MyColumn = REPLACE(MyColumn,'"','')
I have a table "locales" with a column named "name". The records in name always begin with a number of characters folowed by an underscore (ie "foo_", "bar_"...). The record can have more then one underscore and the pattern before the underscore may be repeated (ie "foo_bar_", "foo_foo_").
How, with a simple query, can I get rid of everything before the first underscore including the first underscore itself?
I know how to do this in PHP, but I cannot understand how to do it in MySQL.
SELECT LOCATE('_', 'foo_bar_') ... will give you the location of the first underscore and SUBSTR('foo_bar_', LOCATE('_', 'foo_bar_')) will give you the substring starting from the first underscore. If you want to get rid of that one, too, increment the locate-value by one.
If you now want to replace the values in the tables itself, you can do this with an update-statement like UPDATE table SET column = SUBSTR(column, LOCATE('_', column)).
select substring('foo_bar_text' from locate('_','foo_bar_text'))
MySQL REGEXs can only match data, they can't do replacements. You'd need to do the replacing client-side in your PHP script, or use standard string operations in MySQL to do the changes.
UPDATE sometable SET somefield=RIGHT(LENGTH(somefield) - LOCATE('_', somefield));
Probably got some off-by-one errors in there, but that's the basic way of going about it.