Help with update, please

Hello,

    I have a database table for which I have to update about 15000 of its records.
The problem occured because a program that loaded the table had a bug which was just now discovered. Anyway, here's my problem

I have to update the userid field of all records that match a certain criteria:

     matches "* \[*" escape "\" (space followed by [ ) I want to remove everything from that space before the bracket .. to the end.

For instance:
1 alexb [MBID 08/01/98]
2 janedoe
3 johndoe [MBID 08/01/9
4 longusername [M
5 williamjefferson [

Needs to be
1 alexb
2 janedoe
3 johndoe
4 longusername
5 williamjefferson

What is the best way to do this?
I can only think to select out all the data, dump it to a file, run a perl script,
load it into a temp table, and then update from that temp table.

But because I am dealing with about 15000 records, that is not so desirable :-(

thank you in advance,

alexander Received on Wed Aug 12 1998 - 18:40:36 CDT