A Handly Little MySQL Trick

I recently needed to split a string by delimiter, in this case a full stop . character, and found the following extremely useful to do this:

SELECT
  REPLACE (
    LEFT (
        string_column,
        LOCATE (
          '.', string_column
        )
      ),
  '.', '')
FROM your_table

This nicely changes:

Desired Text.——–.Undesired Text

To:

Desired Text

After subsequently looking it up online, it looks like there are quite a few functions similar to LOCATE (SUBSTRING_INDEX, for example, looks similar). But LOCATE was the first one I encountered, reading around potentially relevant functions, so LOCATE works for me!

12/05/2022: Added blockquote styling!