Question

I have a table in SQL. I have a column named CarMakes, it has the following contents:

Mercedes, BMW
Range Rover
Mazda, Toyota, Honda

I want to know how to return a number of CarMakes in each row.

Returned value should be 2, 1 and 3 respectively.

Answer 1

This is a MySQL-based answer, so it may be inappropriate for your case if you’re using something else. This assumes the values are comma-separated and in the same column (quite an assumption 🙂 ):

SELECT car, (LENGTH(car)-LENGTH(REPLACE(car, ',', ''))+1) AS 'Counts'
FROM CarMakes

I’m sure this will run into issues somewhere, but it may work if your situation doesn’t contain random commas. You can see the SQLFiddle here.