Question

I have a table with a field where words are written separated with new lines. So a select on this single field from to rows will output 3 lines for first row and 2 lines for second row:

Row1    designationer
        nye kolonier
        mindre byer
Row2    udsteder
        bopladser

I would like to do a select that select all these lines as if they had been rows in the table like:

SELECT do_the_split(field) FROM table

so the result would be more like:

Row1    designationer
Row2    nye kolonier
Row3    mindre byer
Row4    udsteder
Row5    bopladser

is there any way to do this in MySQL?

BR. Anders

UPDATE: There are correct answers below but ended up doing it in a semi-manual way. I did this:

1. exporting the the column to a csv
2. Open file in notepad and remove the pings around each line
3. now each word is on a new line
4. save as csv
5. import into database where each line will be a new row

Br. Anders

Answer 1

You can use a stored procedure – similar to what this person did – to accomplish this, essentially utilizing a temp table.

Certainly you could accomplish this locally in your app, as MasterPeter has suggested.