Question

I have a text field that stores a combination of three values, ‘:’ delimited. (looks like A:B:C).

I’d like to split those values into three actual columns in the table, but I’m not sure of the best way to go about doing this. I’m using sqlite3, any help super appreciated!

Answer 1

First, alter the schema to add the columns you want. I’m assuming you know how to do this.

Second, run an “update” query that splits the data.

update mytable set column1=…, column2=…, column3=…;

The trick is formulating the “…” to extract the right columns from the “source” column.

You could quite likely do something with ltrim(), rtrim() and CASE (see http://www.sqlite.org/lang_expr.html), but you might have an easier time if you defined a user-defined function, perhaps based on length() and substring().