I'm trying to do a global replace of search in my database, which has a lot of articles with a double carriage return because of this code:

<p> </p>

I'd like to replace this in my WordPress blog so instead of that appears... nothing, and so I can delete the CR. I've tried this on my database

UPDATE wp_posts set post_content = replace (post_content,'<p> </p>','');

but didn't work. Why? Do I have to add special thinks to consider the space between the <p>and the</p>?

Mmm. Good points, both Jon Angliss and Wim. Jon, as you could have guessed, the database shows no entries with that text string. So there's something going on inside the post_content field.

Wim, the famous   was replaced previously, but there are still hundreds of posts that for some reason have something different between the p and the /p tags.

I've done a search of one of the posts with this error:

mysql> select *  from wp_posts where post_title like '%3DVisionLive%';

And looking in the wp_content field, this is a little piece of the post:

Phil Eisler, responsable de la divisi?n 3D Vision.?</p>
<p>?</p>
<p>Este portal ser? por tanto

No spanish tilde (accent) shown on the terminal, and instead of an space there's a quotation mark between the p and the /p tags. I've tried to replace <p>?</p>, but again, no results. There's some character (or several) there, but I don't know how to discover that. Maybe it's the character set of my terminal, but I've accessed the database from phpmyadmin and in that case there's a space character between the p and the /p. Weird.