Updates a cell in a specified row and unspecified column with content containing a specific string

Question

I have a table with the following columns: name - course1 - course2 - course3. The two lines look like this:

John - physics - math - art
Sara - math - chemistry - psychology

Now that John has been kicked out of math class, I want to replace "math" with "none" in his rows.

When I looked for a solution, I found this:

UPDATE tableName SET `course1` = 'none' WHERE `name`='John' AND `course1`='math';

This might be useful if I knew which column of john "math" was recorded in. But the word can appear in any column. What I need is something like this:

sql_query="Find the row where name='John', then find the column where we have the word 'math', just replace 'math' with 'none' there.

Can you help me solve this problem?

Answer 1

In this case, I think there is no other way than to evaluate each column, like this:

update
   my_table
set 
   course1 = if(course1 = 'math', 'none', course1),
   course2 = if(course2 = 'math', 'none', course2),
   course3 = if(course3 = 'math', 'none', course3)
where
   name = 'John';