Question

I am creating a “simple” search query. I’d like to select a column that should have the value 1 if a specified column LIKE(‘test’), it’s kind of hard to explain.

What i want to do is like this

SELECT *,(CASE mycol LIKE('%test%') as match THEN 1 END) FROM mytable

So if mycol matches the condition, then match=1, if else 0. How would i do that? Sorry if hard to understand.

Answer 1

You are nearly there, but you have made four errors and used one bad practice:

• Add ELSE 0 in your CASE expression.
• CASE expressions need one or more WHEN expressions.
• Put the alias in the correct place – after the end of the expression.
• Don’t use the reserved word match as an alias.

Also, don’t use SELECT *.

Try this:

SELECT
    col1,
    col2,
    ...,
    coln,
    CASE WHEN mycol LIKE '%test%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS zipmatches
FROM mytable

However there’s no need for the CASE expression in MySQL because TRUE and 1 are equivalent:

SELECT
    col1,
    col2,
    ...,
    coln,
    mycol LIKE '%test%' AS zipmatches
FROM mytable