how to update pre tag to code tag in DB

jackmaessen

In vanilla 2.1 i did use geshi for syntaxhighlighting. In 2.2 i want to use creativesyntaxhighlighter for it.
In geshi, all the code is between pre tags like below:

<pre lang="html" line="1">code goes here</pre>
same for php, js and css

In creativesyntax i use the code tag to highlight:

<code lang="html"> code goes here</code>
same for php, js and css

How can i update all the <pre lang="html" line="1"></pre> to <code lang="html></code>

i already tried to run this but without success:
UPDATE GDN_Comment SET Body = '<code lang="php">' WHERE Body = '<pre lang="php" line="1">';

hgtonight

I would dump the db to an sql file, do my replacements there, then import the SQL file.

It doesn't look like MySQL provides a regex function, but I am no MySQL expert.

x00

UPDATE GDN_Comment SET Body = '<code lang="php">' WHERE Body = '<pre lang="php" line="1">';

This is wrong becuase you are saying the entire body is is <pre lang="php" line="1">, and the entire body is to be replaced

You want

UPDATE GDN_Comment SET Body = REPLACE(Body, '<pre lang="php" line="1">', '<code lang="php">') WHERE Body LIKE '%<pre lang="php" line="1">%';

The problem is with this is you don't get the full power regular expression based replace in MySQL. You can me more specific using a replace on a dump.

You are only replacing the first part, which means you will have buck of stray </pre> which you have to replace. <pre> is a legit tag to use. So you could end up with a problem of unmatched closing tags.

There is a good arguments which say using <code> like this incorrect if you want a code block it should be defined

<pre><code>[code goes here]</code></pre> and inline code just uses <code>.

jackmaessen

I would dump the db to an sql file, do my replacements there, then import the SQL file.

Brilliant idea @hgtonight !
I dumped to DB to localhost.sql, modified all the tags with this tool: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/
Import the sql file again and in a couple of minutes the job was done!
Thank God there is https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/

hgtonight

Glad you got it working @jackmaessen