Question

I don’t know how to solve this situation. The problem is with the OR operator that I’m using to retrieve the location from zip_codes table. For example If somebody enters just “NY” as the input I want to retrieve just this field.

The table data is like this:

+------+-------+--------------------------------------+
| zip  | state | city                                 |
+------+-------+--------------------------------------+
| 12345| NY    | Schenectady                          |
+------+-------+--------------------------------------+

And for example possible input is “NY”, so my query looks like:

SELECT zip, state, city 
  FROM zip_codes 
 WHERE name = 'NY' 
    OR zip = 'NY' 
    OR city ='NY' 
 LIMIT 1

I want to retrieve just the field state in the above case, because this means the user sets just the state as the reference. If they enters “Schenectady” – city field, if they enters “12345” – just the zip code field, etc..

Yes, I can set this in PHP from a bunch of if’s but maybe is some SQL query outhere that I don’t know

Answer 1

select *, case when zip = 'NY' 
               then 'zip'
               when name = 'NY' 
               then 'name'
               when city = 'NY' 
               then 'city'
          end as found
from zip_codes
where 'NY' in (name, zip, city)
limit 1