Sql in php not working might be encoding? - php

Question

My SQL code works when i do it phpmyadmin but when i run it in my php script it does not return anything i think it might be the encoding(was utf8) so i changed it to ansi but no difference. Might one of you be able to see if there is anything wrong with it?
(it's a script to remove images from a Wordpress post)
The code:
$query = "SELECT * FROM `wp_posts` where post_content like'%<img%\>'" or die("Error in the consult.." . mysqli_error($link));//THIS IS THE QUERY THAT DOES NOT WORK
$result = $link->query($query);
/*function filter($toFilter)
{
$pattern = "/<img.*?>/";
$filtered = "";
if(preg_match($pattern,$toFilter))
{
$filtered = preg_replace($pattern,'',$toFilter);
}
return (string)$filtered;
}
*/
while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)) {
$id = $row['ID'];
$toFilter = $row['post_content'];
$toFilter = (string)$toFilter;
$pattern = "/<img.*?>/";
$filtered = "";
if(preg_match($pattern,$toFilter))
{
$filtered = preg_replace($pattern,'',$toFilter);
}
$filtered = (string)$filtered;
$link->query("update wp_posts set post_content = $filtered where ID = $id;");
echo 'this works';
}

Answer 1

you have to escape this slash in '%<img%\>' (unless your point is to escape the >?)
Images don't have closing tags (http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#edef-IMG) so you might as well look for the starting tag
Stay with utf8
$pattern = "/<img.*?>/"; could be simply $pattern = "/<img.*>/";. the * means 0 or more, while the ? means optional so it's pretty much redundant