What is the MySQL query equivalent of PHP strip_tags?

Question

I have a large database which contains records that have tags in them and I would like to remove them. Of course there is the method where I create a

Answer 1

Compatible with MySQL 8+ and MariaDB 10.0.5+

SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(body, '<[^>]*>+', '') FROM app_cms_sections

Answer 2

I just extended the answer @boann to allow targetting of any specific tag so that we can replace out the tags one by one with each function call. You just need pass the tag parameter, e.g. 'a' to replace out all opening/closing anchor tags. This answers the question asked by OP, unlike the accepted answer, which strips out ALL tags.

# MySQL function to programmatically replace out specified html tags from text/html fields

# run this to drop/update the stored function
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `strip_tags`;

DELIMITER |

# function to nuke all opening and closing tags of type specified in argument 2
CREATE FUNCTION `strip_tags`($str text, $tag text) RETURNS text
BEGIN
    DECLARE $start, $end INT DEFAULT 1;
    SET $str = COALESCE($str, '');
    LOOP
        SET $start = LOCATE(CONCAT('<', $tag), $str, $start);
        IF (!$start) THEN RETURN $str; END IF;
        SET $end = LOCATE('>', $str, $start);
        IF (!$end) THEN SET $end = $start; END IF;
        SET $str = INSERT($str, $start, $end - $start + 1, '');
        SET $str = REPLACE($str, CONCAT('</', $tag, '>'), '');
    END LOOP;
END;

| DELIMITER ;

# test select to nuke all opening <a> tags
SELECT 
    STRIP_TAGS(description, 'a') AS stripped
FROM
    tmpcat;

# run update query to replace out all <a> tags
UPDATE tmpcat
SET 
    description = STRIP_TAGS(description, 'a');

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Boann's works once I added SET $str = COALESCE($str, '');.

from this post:

Also to note, you may want to put a SET $str = COALESCE($str, ''); just before the loop otherwise null values may cause a crash/never ending query. – Tom C Aug 17 at 9:51

Answer 5

Here you go:

CREATE FUNCTION `strip_tags`($str text) RETURNS text
BEGIN
    DECLARE $start, $end INT DEFAULT 1;
    LOOP
        SET $start = LOCATE("<", $str, $start);
        IF (!$start) THEN RETURN $str; END IF;
        SET $end = LOCATE(">", $str, $start);
        IF (!$end) THEN SET $end = $start; END IF;
        SET $str = INSERT($str, $start, $end - $start + 1, "");
    END LOOP;
END;

I made sure it removes mismatched opening brackets because they're dangerous, though it ignores any unpaired closing brackets because they're harmless.

mysql> select strip_tags('<span>hel<b>lo <a href="world">wo<>rld</a> <<x>again<.');
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| strip_tags('<span>hel<b>lo <a href="world">wo<>rld</a> <<x>again<.') |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| hello world again.                                                   |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set

Answer 6

MySQL >= 5.5 provides XML functions to solve your issue:

SELECT ExtractValue(field, '//text()') FROM table;

Reference: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/xml-functions.html