Extracting information out of a column with regexs in MySQL

Question

Hello,

Is it possible to get the (first?) match of a regex and output it within a select? It looks like the REGEXP function only return whether there has been a match or not. I want to be able to extract information out of a varchar column without having to use complex SUBSTRING-LOCATION nestings.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/regexp.html that's all there is. You can't do more than pattern comparison.