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

This one looks elegant to me. Strip all after n-th separator, rotate string, strip everything after 1. separator, rotate back.

select
  reverse(
    substring_index(
      reverse(substring_index(str,separator,substrindex)),
      separator,
      1)
  );

For example:

select
  reverse(
    substring_index(
      reverse(substring_index('www.mysql.com','.',2)),
      '.',
      1
    )
  );