Search for a tag in a table column

1

I want to search for a text in the table column which has got <em> tag without any anchor tags inside.

From the following two:

  1. <em> some text </em>
  2. <em> some text <a>anchor tag</a></em>

I want '<em> some text </em>' as the output. Second one has got anchor tag within <em> tag, which I want to exclude. Could anyone
please help.

2 
WHERE YourColumn LIKE '%<em>%</em>%'
      AND YourColumn NOT LIKE '%<em>%<%</em>%'

however, this would, wrongly??, catch

<em> some text <em>further emphasized</em></em>

My LIKE test is assuming that EM and /EM are not necessarily the first/last elements in the column. If you only want to match first/last then remote the leading & trails "%"

3

P.S. this is all a bit "wobbly". I am only looking for an "<" within the EM ... /EM which of course might not be a TAG, If you want to do a "proper job" you'll need something that parses the content ... SQL's RegEx isn't up to that job.

4

or

where len(col+'#')-len(replace(replace(col1+'#','<em>',''),'</em>',''))=9