I have a strange question. I have a normal text field (called plantname) in a table (Plants) that has plant names like this:

Delphinium * Black Knight
Delphinium * Red Flower 3
Delphinium * Blue Orchid
etc.

I obviously can select the first one with:
select * from Plants where plantname = 'Delphinium * Black Knight'

Is it possible to get mysql to select on plantname but preprocess the text and apply a regex to it first? what I'm trying to do is make the above select also work like this:
select * from Plants where plantname = 'delphinium-black-knight'

So I would like mysql to pretend the only characters in plantname are A-Za-z0-9 and the spaces are a dash. I know I could just recreate a new field and copy the names over in the delphinium-black-knight format, but I'm trying not too.

Any got a clue?
Thanks.

what difference do you expect this 'pre processing' to achieve
what isn't working as you'd expect or need
is this a kludge workaround for a flaky physical design

ya, I'm going to create a new field. thats way to difficult otherwise.

sorry
I still don't understand what you are trying to achieve. I suspect you need to redesign the table but I'm not sure. However I am certain the storing what is essentially the same information in two columns definately is a symptom of a poor design