I have a large database which contains records that have <a> tags in them and I would like to remove them. Of course there is the method where I create a PHP script that selects all, uses strip_tags and updates the database, but this takes a long time. So how can I do this with a simple (or complicated) MySQL query?
I don't believe there's any efficient way to do this in MySQL alone.
MySQL does have a REPLACE() function, but it can only replace constant strings, not patterns. You could possibly write a MySQL stored function to search for and replace tags, but at that point you're probably better off writing a PHP script to do the job. It might not be quite as fast, but it will probably be faster to write.