title: sql query to convert new line character to a html <br>
body: <p>I have a mysql database of articles that were entered into a textarea with no formatting, they use only a newline character for line breaks</p>
  
  <pre><code>\n
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I need to convert all of these into html br tags</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;br /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>can you help me write a query to do this that I can run in phpmyadmin that will do this?</p>
  
  <p>the name of the table is</p>
  
  <pre><code>exp_channel_data
  </code></pre>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>as a bonus question...</p>
  
  <p>Is there a query I can run that will strip everything out of the middle of p and span tags</p>
  
  <p>I want to get rid of this stuff</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;p class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&gt;
  &lt;span face="Times New Roman"&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and end up with just this</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;p&gt;
  &lt;span&gt;
  </code></pre>