Doing a regexp-based search/replace?

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Hello:

I've got a table containing property_id's with values of the form
###-####. I would like to discard the slash onwards (and I can't use a
substr() because I am not guaranteed if a) the -#### portion exists, b)
what position it exists from.

If this were a text file, I would use a sed expression such as:

cat textfile | sed 's/-.*$//'

I've been looking for a way to do this with PostgreSQL but so far haven't
found a function that seems to be suitable. I thought maybe I could do it
with translate, but translate doesn't appear to work with regular
expressions. So far I've tried things like:

select translate(property_id, '-.*', '') from mytable;

I need to do this, because the -.* portion of my property_id was entered
in error, and I would like to do an update on the entire table and just
have the left-hand side of the property_id column remaining.

Any ideas? Thank you in advance.

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