Archive for the ‘Regular Expressions’ tag
Regular Expressions in MySQL
I like regular expressions. Anyone who has tried to understand them will understand the learning curve involved and in no way do I claim to be an expert. However, I use them all the time. They are possibly the most useful thing I have ever learnt to do with programming and are more powerful I imagined at first.
So what does this have to do with MySQL?
Well, I was recently dealing wit a table in which there is some inline JSON serialised data. This makes sense for the situation but of course if you want to query on something within the data you have to be a bit more careful. You have two options as I saw it yesterday:
- Pull all the data and parse it out outside of the database - which seems weak and inefficient.
- Use some LIKE query to pull likely candidates and then parse out of the data base - again not so good, but a bit better.