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

If you know the position you want to extract from as opposed to what the data itself is:

$colNumber = 2; //2nd position
$sql = "REPLACE(SUBSTRING(SUBSTRING_INDEX(fooField, ':', $colNumber),
                             LENGTH(SUBSTRING_INDEX(fooField, 
                                                    ':', 
                                                    $colNumber - 1)) + 1)";