What is the MySQL query equivalent of PHP strip_tags?

Question

I have a large database which contains records that have tags in them and I would like to remove them. Of course there is the method where I create a

Answer 1

I just extended the answer @boann to allow targetting of any specific tag so that we can replace out the tags one by one with each function call. You just need pass the tag parameter, e.g. 'a' to replace out all opening/closing anchor tags. This answers the question asked by OP, unlike the accepted answer, which strips out ALL tags.

# MySQL function to programmatically replace out specified html tags from text/html fields

# run this to drop/update the stored function
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `strip_tags`;

DELIMITER |

# function to nuke all opening and closing tags of type specified in argument 2
CREATE FUNCTION `strip_tags`($str text, $tag text) RETURNS text
BEGIN
    DECLARE $start, $end INT DEFAULT 1;
    SET $str = COALESCE($str, '');
    LOOP
        SET $start = LOCATE(CONCAT('<', $tag), $str, $start);
        IF (!$start) THEN RETURN $str; END IF;
        SET $end = LOCATE('>', $str, $start);
        IF (!$end) THEN SET $end = $start; END IF;
        SET $str = INSERT($str, $start, $end - $start + 1, '');
        SET $str = REPLACE($str, CONCAT(''), '');
    END LOOP;
END;

| DELIMITER ;

# test select to nuke all opening  tags
SELECT 
    STRIP_TAGS(description, 'a') AS stripped
FROM
    tmpcat;

# run update query to replace out all  tags
UPDATE tmpcat
SET 
    description = STRIP_TAGS(description, 'a');