How to do a regular expression replace in MySQL?

Question

I have a table with ~500k rows; varchar(255) UTF8 column filename contains a file name;

I'm trying to strip out various strange characters out of the filename - thought I'd use a character class: [^a-zA-Z0-9()_ .\-]

Now, is there a function in MySQL that lets you replace through a regular expression? I'm looking for a similar functionality to REPLACE() function - simplified example follows:

SELECT REPLACE('stackowerflow', 'ower', 'over');

Output: "stackoverflow"

/* does something like this exist? */
SELECT X_REG_REPLACE('Stackoverflow','/[A-Zf]/','-'); 

Output: "-tackover-low"

I know about REGEXP/RLIKE, but those only check if there is a match, not what the match is.

(I could do a "SELECT pkey_id,filename FROM foo WHERE filename RLIKE '[^a-zA-Z0-9()_ .\-]'" from a PHP script, do a preg_replace and then "UPDATE foo ... WHERE pkey_id=...", but that looks like a last-resort slow & ugly hack)

Answer 1

MySQL 8.0+:

You can use the native REGEXP_REPLACE function.

Older versions:

You can use a user-defined function (UDF) like mysql-udf-regexp.