find and replace and update with php and mysql

Well, here's the deal - I had a SQL Server database with about 400,000 records that within one of the columns had urls in them that I wanted to turn into hyperlinks. So I wrote a program in vb that used regular expressions to change them over and one by one insert the records into a mysql database which is now on my server at hostgator(This process took forever). The problem is I was stupid and did not test it enough. It did not replace any of the urls that did not have a www in it. I need to find and replace with php and regular expressions then do an update(the cell is text) on the mysql database. Is this possible? - I normally do everything in ASP.NET and have never written anything in php - I am not asking anyone to write this for me but any help would be greatly appreciated. I hope this made sense.

Thanks,

Joe

 

Couldn't you just have, in your php:
echo '<a href="'.$url.'">Anchor Text</a>';

 

That would be nice - but unfortunately I am using article dashboard an all the code is encrypted.

 

you can validate email using regular expression in mysql

 

They are URLs... and he knows he can do it with regex, he is asking how to do it practically.

Something like this?

mysql_connect('localhost', 'user', 'password');
mysql_select_db('your_db');

$res = mysql_query("SELECT field FROM table");

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($res, MYSQL_NUM)) {
  $field = preg_replace('~(^|[^"\'])(http://(www\.)?(.+))(\s|$)~', '<a href="$2">$2</a>', $row[0]);
  mysql_query("UPDATE table SET field = '$field' WHERE field = '$row[0]' ");
}

PHP:

 

That is what I needed - thank you so much