How to Remove HTML Tags from MySQL Data Efficiently?

MySQL Equivalent to PHP strip_tags for Removing HTML Tags

To remove HTML tags from a large database containing records with elements, a PHP script using strip_tags followed by a database update is commonly employed. However, this approach can be time-consuming. Fortunately, MySQL offers a more efficient solution using XML functions introduced in version 5.5.

MySQL Query:

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

Explanation:

The ExtractValue() function extracts the text content from an XML document, effectively removing any markup tags. The '//text()' argument selects all text nodes in the XML document, which correspond to the content within the HTML tags.

Example:

Consider the following database:

| id | title |
|---|---|
| 1 | This is an example <h1>title</h1> |
| 2 | Another example <a href="#">link</a> |

Query Result:

| title |
|---|---|
| This is an example title |
| Another example link |

Reference:

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

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