Don't know the answer to your question and I know you are working in an existing database but..
In postgres when I performed something similar to this (needed to extract the first <b>text</b> tag), I included a trigger/function routine on save/update using plsql which extracted the "title" and placed it into a second column in the database.
This enabled me to perform searches on the full text or the title and rank the responses accordingly and also speeded up getting just the title at the expense of slowing down creations/edits.
In your situation I would create the trigger/function and add a "title" column to the database. Then I would
Code: Select all
UPDATE <tablename> SET <column>=<column>;
which would run the trigger an fill in the respective data.
Not sure how feasible this is in MySql.
Possible other solutions directly to your question have you also tried \n\r or combinations of the same or can you use regular expressions in MySQL ?
EDIT: Just looked up
Regular Expression in MySql 5.1. MAY be the solution if there is some way to return the part matcg and should be more robust to use with [:space:] but not exactly sure.