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Databases Reporting with SQL Working with Text Replacing Portions of Text

Posted by Hanna Han
Hanna Han
4,105 Points

Replace usage

Hi,

I don't really get why we need to use the function of Replace. I understand the concept of Replace function but I still have doubt of its necessity and usage in effective way in handling database. Could you give me more better example in detail?

2 Answers

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,269 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,269 Points

I thought the video example was quite practical. Another one might be if you wanted to display addresses but spell out the word "Street" where the stored address has it abbreviated:

SELECT REPLACE(address, 'St.', 'Street') as Address FROM subscribers;

Whether it is "necessary" will depend on what is stored in the database, and in many cases it may not be.

Dennis Amiel Domingo
Dennis Amiel Domingo
17,813 Points
Dennis Amiel Domingo
Dennis Amiel Domingo
17,813 Points

This is just a guess since I haven't reached the "Integrating PHP with Databases" yet. But I think this can be useful when you're handling user inputs. You can have them standardized not just for viewing purposes, but for functions, variables, or even arrays in PHP that need uniform data. Or maybe if you're copying them to another database, the REPLACE function can be useful in standardizing the data.