Replace Text Within A String With REPLACE

Substitute all occurrences of a substring with a new value using `REPLACE`.

5/5 supported engines validation-green 1 example 2 scenarios

Docker-validated Not currently validation-green

Example 1

Replace a word in message bodies

Every occurrence of 'World' is replaced with 'SQL' in the output. The stored data is not modified — use UPDATE ... SET body = REPLACE(body, 'World', 'SQL') to persist the change.

Source table data Rows loaded before the example query runs.

Setup

CREATE TABLE messages (id INT, body VARCHAR(200));

INSERT INTO
  messages (id, body)
VALUES
  (1, 'Hello World'),
  (2, 'World is great');

Validated query Shared across supported engines.

SQL

SELECT
  id,
  REPLACE (body, 'World', 'SQL') AS updated_body
FROM
  messages
ORDER BY
  id;

Expected result Returned rows for the shared example.

id	updated_body
1	Hello SQL
2	SQL is great

Output is identical across all engines.

Useful when

Where this command helps.

substituting a word or pattern across multiple rows in a query result
cleaning up stored text without modifying the underlying data

Explanation

What the command is doing.

REPLACE(string, search, replacement) returns a new string with every occurrence of search replaced by replacement. The search is case-sensitive in most engines. It replaces all occurrences, not just the first. REPLACE is useful for cleaning data, fixing typos in bulk, or reformatting stored values.

Replace Text Within A String With REPLACE

Replace a word in message bodies

Where this command helps.

What the command is doing.

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