How to concatenate these two statements (RIGHT and LEFT)? I am trying to trim two characters off both the beginning and end of cell Is it possible to either combine or concatenate the following two statements?

RIGHT(wp_postmeta.meta_value, LENGTH(meta_value) -2)

LEFT(wp_postmeta.meta_value, LENGTH(meta_value) -2)

What I am ultimately trying to do is strip the first two and last two characters from a field (for display or output only...I am not trying to modify or replace anything in my database).

Below is my full query, which works great...except the output of wp_postmeta.meta_value is a URL encased with [" and "].

SELECT wp_download_log.ID, wp_download_log.download_date, wp_posts.post_title,

(SELECT group_concat(wp_terms.name separator ', ') FROM wp_terms 
INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy on wp_terms.term_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_id 
INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships wpr on wpr.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id 
WHERE taxonomy= 'dlm_download_category' and wp_posts.ID = wpr.object_id ) AS "Categories",

wp_postmeta.meta_value, wp_download_log.download_id, wp_download_log.version_id, wp_download_log.user_id, wp_download_log.user_ip, wp_download_log.user_agent
FROM wp_posts
LEFT JOIN wp_download_log ON wp_posts.ID = wp_download_log.download_id
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta ON wp_download_log.version_id = wp_postmeta.post_id
WHERE wp_postmeta.meta_key = '_files'

In there you will see that one column I am trying to output is wp_postmeta.meta_value where wp_postmeta.meta_key = '_files'.

Inserting one of my two statements I am trying to combine in place of wp_postmeta.meta_value works great. Inserting both works too...I just have two columns.

With my search for a unified solution coming up dry, I have been trying for the past hour or two to concatenate the two to get the contents of wp_postmeta.meta_value WHERE meta_key = '_files' into a single field, sans the first two and last two characters, but I have yet to figure out how.

Surely there is a SQL solution here without having to manually process the column in Excel with each export?
3 is the first position after the first 2 chars are removed. The length is reduced by 2 chars in the beginning + 2 characters at the end.

select MID(wp_postmeta.meta_value, 3, LENGTH(wp_postmeta.meta_value) -4 ) ...


simplied fiddle