Search and replace text across all posts

Question

I had used the ZD Video Plugin for WP a long time, and now, since my move to WP 3.0.2, it doesn't work anymore. To embed a YouTube video using the plugin, I would just write

[zdvideo]url-of-youtube-video[/zdvideo]

Now I need to go back to plain YouTube embedding. How do I write a MySQL query that searches for [zdvideo]*[zdvideo] and replaces it with *?

Answer 1

What about these two queries?

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '[zdvideo]', '');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '[/zdvideo]', '');

Answer 2

Best I'm aware, MySQL doesn't have much of a regexp replace functionality -- not to mention its very clunky regexp syntax. So this is easiest to do at the php level. Start by fetching all posts that have the shortcode:

$posts = $wpdb->get_results("
SELECT ID, post_content
FROM $wpdb->posts
WHERE post_content LIKE '%[zdvideo]%'
");

And then loop through the result:

foreach ($posts as $post) {
  $post->post_content = preg_replace(
    "/\\[zdvideo\\](.+?)\\[\\/zdvideo\\]/",
    "$1", # $1 holds the url... format as needed
    $post->post_content);

  # Be sure to verify on a few posts before actually saving...
  # var_dump($post->post_content);

  $wpdb->query("
  UPDATE $wdpb->posts
  SET post_content = '" . $wpdb->escape($post->post_content) . "'
  WHERE ID = " . intval($post->ID)
  );
}

Answer 3

or use the plugin Search & Replace, makes easy for use sql inside WP; use the like statement and give you an gui for search/replace strings in content and other tables.