> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> We have numerous identical tables with a varchar column that holds data
>> like this: "0 0 0 1 0 1 0 25 7 0 139 0 9". Essentially there are a bunch >> of integers with a single space as a separator. There _should_ be no more >> than 30 entries ( and 29 spaces ), but sometimes the system misfires and >> there are more or less. Is there a MySQL solution to getting a count of >> the spaces present in the field, figuring that spaces + 1 will equal >> entries? It's fairly straight forward using a PHP application, but I'd >> like to get the DB server to accomplish this task. Not having much luck >> finding a solution in the manual. > > SELECT > CHAR_LENGTH(field_name) - CHAR_LENGTH(REPLACE(field_name, ' ', '')) as > num_spaces FROM my_table; > > Cheers, > >Jay Thanks Baron, Jay, Rolando, and Francesco. Just what I needed. David
