MySQL Normal Text to Spinal Case Convertion

Question

I have a table colum with general text values ex:

"This is Gerald's Sample Text: With some special chars"

I need to convert this text to:

"this-is-geralds-sample-text-with-some-special-chars"

with MySQL InnoDB and save the value in a separate unique column in the same table. Is there a simpler way of achieving this with a query without using procedures?

Possible duplicate of [How to do a regular expression replace in MySQL?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/986826/how-to-do-a-regular-expression-replace-in-mysql) — cwallenpoole, Sep 06 '17 at 05:42

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 07 '17 at 10:08

The short answer is "No". You're looking for something that behaves exactly like a regular expression, and MySQL does not support regex replace natively.

The longer answer is "No, but there are workarounds." You have a couple of options, and I don't terribly like either. The first is to create a function like in this question. The second is to come up with a list of bad characters and then use a set of REPLACE calls. It's ugly, but it will work.

On a side note: you might consider creating this value with your application and then just store along with the original. That would be cleaner in some ways than using a custom MySQL function.

MySQL Normal Text to Spinal Case Convertion

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