Search for text between delimiters in MySQL

Question

I am trying to extract a certain part of a column that is between delimiters.

e.g. find foo in the following

test \'esf :foo: bar

So in the above I\'d wa

Answer 1

Here ya go, bud:

SELECT 
  SUBSTR(column, 
    LOCATE(':',column)+1, 
      (CHAR_LENGTH(column) - LOCATE(':',REVERSE(column)) - LOCATE(':',column))) 
FROM table

Yea, no clue why you're doing this, but this will do the trick.

By performing a LOCATE, we can find the first ':'. To find the last ':', there's no reverse LOCATE, so we have to do it manually by performing a LOCATE(':', REVERSE(column)).

With the index of the first ':', the number of chars from the last ':' to the end of the string, and the CHAR_LENGTH (don't use LENGTH() for this), we can use a little math to discover the length of the string between the two instances of ':'.

This way we can peform a SUBSTR and dynamically pluck out the characters between the two ':'.

Again, it's gross, but to each his own.