MySQL Blog Revisited – Regular Expressions

Earlier this year, we published a series of blog posts that focused on regular expressions and their use with MySQL. Here is a summary of each post.

Regular Expressions in MySQL

This is the first post in the series and discusses some basic pattern matching and simple text replacement.

More Regular Expressions in MySQL

In this next post, we show how to use regular expression pattern matching and built-in MySQL functions to satisfy a business rule: return a substring from a blob of text where the text matches a given pattern and includes characters on either side of the pattern.

A Different RegEx Solution in MySQL

In this post, we revisit the requirement of the previous post but try a slightly different solution. The purpose of this post is to show that with RegEx, there is often more than one way to match a pattern.

Using RegEx Subexperssions in MySQL

For this post, we focus on subexpressions. We explain what subexpressions are, the syntax for defining them, and how to use them to replace text in a pattern match.

RegEx Backreferences in MySQL

This next post focuses on backreferences. We describe how backreferences work, break down the syntax to define them, and show how to use backreferences to find duplicated words in a block of text.

Using Lookahead & Lookbehind in MySQL Regular Expressions

The requirements we tackle in this post might seem daunting or nearly impossible. However, with the help of lookahead and lookbehind pattern matching, we can not only meet the requirements but also do so in very little code.