Question

I have a table called articles and I would like to retrieve all articles that contain a tag, in the articleTags field. The articleTags field contains a set of comma delimited strings (the tags).

If I am trying to find an article that contains the tag php from a table it should return results that had a articleTags field that looks like this –

• php
• c++,php,python

If I was doing this in PHP, I would simple use explode, but I don’t want to go through every row in the database, and instead use a more efficient method.

Answer 1

you could use the like operator

select * from articles where tag like '%php%'

if you are worried about tags which are not php but have php in them like say phphp then you can use with comma

select * from articles where tag like '%php,%' or tag like '%,php%'