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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T19:42:52+00:00

Currently I am using commas , to save tags as text and when I

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Currently I am using commas “,” to save tags as text and when I neeed them to process and use somewhere I need to explode the string e.g. “usa,canada,crime,Toronto,music,fall”.

I was thinking if there is any better way ( less resource and time-consuming friendly ) of doing this tag or is this the only solution that everybody use.

EDIT:
I have a small project, without tags managment in admin. I do not need to have three tables just for tags in db. I am just looking for some more clever solution how to save and explode the tags from the saved strings in the database.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use the three-table approach, really! Really really!

    Otherwise, how will you query items that have tag “usa” without also getting items tagged with “usable”? LIKE %usa% will return both.

    See this for a discussion on three methods for implementing tags in db:
    http://www.pui.ch/phred/archives/2005/04/tags-database-schemas.html

    EDIT in response to comment:

    Commas, commas, commas…

    Commas won’t help won’t help won’t help. Example tag field: culture,usa. How will you LIKE this?

    You could arguably save tags in format: ,culture,usa, (stating and ending with a comma).

    Imho that will bring along some special cases and it will in the end become more complicated that the three-table approach.

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