Is there a MySQL equivalent of PHP's preg_replace?

Question

I have a to match a field in MySQL, for which I thought I could use a regular expression, but it appears that MySQL doesn't have the functionality I need to do the job. Here's the scenario:

I have a variable in PHP called $url. Let's say this variable is set as the string "/article/my-article/page/2". I also have a table of URLs in MySQL from which I would like to pull content. The URLs stored in my table, however, include wildcards.

Previously, I had this set up so that the value stored in the table looked like this: "/article/%/page/%".

With that configuration, I could just run:

SELECT * FROM urls WHERE '$url' LIKE url

And this would match, which is the desired functionality.

What I'd like to do now, is allow a more advanced wildcard, such that instead of "/article/%/page/%", my MySQL data could be "/article/{{slug}}/page/{{page_no}}".

I want to create a SQL query that will match this data, using the same $url input. LIKE is no longer the correct comparison, since I'm not using the built-in "%" wildcard, but rather {{.*}}. Any ideas how to accomplish this?

Answer 1

There is a library of user defined functions that gives you preg_replace in MySQL: http://www.mysqludf.org/lib_mysqludf_preg/