Extracting Plain Text from HTML Using MySQL Queries

To remove HTML tags from database records, you can leverage MySQL XML functions instead of employing a PHP script. Here's how:

Query Using ExtractValue() for MySQL >= 5.5

Starting with MySQL version 5.5, the ExtractValue() function allows you to extract text content from within XML elements. By passing the HTML field to ExtractValue() and specifying the XPath expression '//text()', you can retrieve the plain text value:

SELECT ExtractValue(field, '//text()') FROM table;

This query effectively removes all HTML tags from the specified field, returning only the plain text content.

Reference:

• [MySQL XML Functions Documentation](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/xml-functions.html)