Extract all links from a database table using SQL?

Question

I need to extarct all links from a database so I can create a URL rewrite. Using a SQL statement, how can I extract just links from a table? Sometimes there is more than one link within a cell which further complicates it. Any idea on how to achieve this?

EDIT An example of this would be: SELECT myval FROM htmlcontrols. "myval" has an HTML string such as " <div>Hi this is a test. <a href="somewhere.htm">Click here</a> or <a href="http://somewhereelse.com/testarea">here</a></div> ". I want an extract like this:

LINKS
-----
somewhere.htm
http://somewhereelse.com/testarea

Answer 1

You are probably better off either handling this on the client side, iterating through the fields and parsing the HTML to then re-insert them on whatever table/columns you need to; or at least, creating a UDF that can do the parsing efficiently.

Note that the link I posted above is an implementation of a UDF RegEx function but I am not suggesting necessarily that you should use a RegEx to parse HTML as this is almost always a bad idea .

If you go with the CLR function, take a look at HTMLAgilityPack