Changing many descriptions at once

I recently took over administration of a web site run on Zencart, which I am very familiar with.

The last genius who ran this site copy/pasted a section of text into every product description for about 1700 products, which included information that could change over time.

It has changed...

Now I need to replace a repeating block of text in 1700 product descriptions with the new block of text.

Please tell me I can do this somehow without manually editing every product. Maybe go into the database itself and do some sort of replace command in an editor?

BE SURE TO DO A FULL DATABASE BACKUP FIRST!!!!

SQL command could be:```
update products_description set products_description = REPLACE(products_description, 'from_str' , 'to_str');

I RECOMMEND TESTING ON A *TEST* DATABASE FIRST, and NOT on a live site.

To re-use blocks of text in repeated product descriptions, you could set up boilerplate text as described here

http://www.thatsoftwareguy.com/zencart_php_in_description.html

It works very well.