Remove special characters from a database field

Question

I have a database with several thousand records, and I need to strip down one of the fields to ensure that it only contains certain characters (Alphanumeric, spaces, and sin

Answer 1

The Replace() function is first choice. However, Special Characters can sometimes be tricky to write in a console. For those you can combine Replace with the Char() function.

e.g. removing €

Update products set description = replace(description, char(128), '');

You can find all the Ascii values here

Ideally you could do a regex to find all the special chars, but apparently that's not possible with MySQL.

Beyond that, you'd need to run it through your favorite scripting language.