Lana:
The easiest thing would be if your field always contained the same number of comma-separated strings. Then you could just do something like a SUBSTRING_INDEX() function to break out the field into separate values. But, assuming your field does not always contain the same number of strings...
I'm imagining the contents of <field1> look like "abc,def,ghi". You want to do:
SELECT FUNCTION_NAME( field1 )
and get back
Row1: abc
Row2: def
Row3: ghi
If that's right, off the top of my head you have two options. The first option I can think of would be to break out these values into another table. Instead of a comma-separated list inside a field, move that field to another table and break each value into it's own record, linked back to the parent table by ID. A quick search of the list archives will bring up better descriptions on how to normalize than I could give.
The other, possibly simpler, option is to handle it in PHP. You could just grab the field, containing a list of strings delimited by commas, and use the explode() function to get your results. The PHP site has plenty of examples on the usage of explode.
http://us2.php.net/explode
Wes
On Jun 30, 2004, at 5:35 PM, L a n a wrote:
Hello, I’m working on a search function using PHP4 and MYSQL4.
I’m looking for a function that allow to take a string value (consisted of several substrings separated by coma) out of db field and return each substring one by one.
Could you please tell me if there is a function that can do something similar to
SELECT function_name (field_name, “,”) (return)-> substr1, substr2, substr3
Thank you for your help, Lana
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