REGEX_REPLACE not matching all chars from the beginning to the first occurrence of a 5 digits word

Question

I've this record in a Mysql table:

ADDRESS
----------------------------------
sdasd 4354 ciao 12345 sdsdsa asfds 

I would like to match all chars from the beginning to the first occurrence of a 5 digits word, including it. In this case, using REGEXP_REPLACE, I would like to remove the substring matched and return sdsdsa asfds .

What I've tried to do is this:

SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE(ADDRESS, '^.+\b\d{5}\b.','') FROM `mytable`

The regexp seems to work testing it in this snippet and I cannot understand why Mysql won't.

Answer 1

MySQL supports POSIX regex which doesn't support PERL like properties eg \b , \d etc.

This regex should work for you:

SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE
('sdasd 4354 ciao 12345 sdsdsa asfds', '^.+[[:<:]][0-9]{5}[[:blank:]]+', '') as val;

+--------------+
| val          |
+--------------+
| sdsdsa asfds |
+--------------+

RegEx Details:

• ^.+ : Match 1 or more of any characters at the start (greedy)
• [[:<:]] : Match a word boundary (zero width)
• [0-9]{5} : Match exactly 5 digits
• [[:blank:]]+ : Match 1 or more of whitespaces (tab or space)