strip tags - What is the MySQL query equivalent of PHP strip_tags?

Question

I have a large database which contains records that have <a> tags in them and I would like to remove them. Of course there is the method where I create a PHP script that selects all, uses strip_tags and updates the database, but this takes a long time. So how can I do this with a simple (or complicated) MySQL query?

Answer 1

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